Tim Hilliard » General http://www.timhilliard.com Website Development, Optimisation and Analytics Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:27:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Zone, my new home http://www.timhilliard.com/zone-my-new-home http://www.timhilliard.com/zone-my-new-home#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 23:56:57 +0000 timhilliard http://www.timhilliard.com/?p=48 Well after an interesting start to 2009 things have finally settled down for me and I have now found myself working for Zone Content as a dedicated drupal developer. I’d like to thank the guys at Zone for giving me such a welcome reception. For me this is something new as this will be the first time I get to work for a dedicated content/media agency. Previously I have worked for companies that only deal with websites, now I get to see the inner working of everything to do with copyrighting, publishing and other interesting facets of Zone.

]]> http://www.timhilliard.com/zone-my-new-home/feed 0 Power to the people http://www.timhilliard.com/power-to-the-people http://www.timhilliard.com/power-to-the-people#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:22:09 +0000 timhilliard http://www.timhilliard.com/?p=45 So having been in the web caper for a little while now I thought it was time to discuss my experiences of open source.

Probably my most profound experience in the open source arena came about when I was asked to do a project in Drupal, a highly configurable and customisable CMS package. After a little experimentation I was soon able to harness the true potential of Drupal and now use Drupal for all of my standard CMS installations. With a user base of over 400 000 users, Drupal has become a powerhouse in the world of content managed systems. Overall I would say that Drupal was a truly positive experience for me and has allowed me to grow significantly in the last 2 years as a developer.

I could keep going on about different open source packages but then this post would become infintely long so instead what I will do now is list all of the open source packages that I use and give a brief overview of why I like it.

  • Drupal – as mentioned before a powerful CMS solution.
  • Ubercart – a truly fantastic ecommerce solution that gives store owners a fantastic set of tools out of the box for setting up their own online store. The software sits on top of Drupal to give users really powerful control over the look and feel of their site..
  • WordPress – a great piece of blogging software that is also being used to run this blog.
  • jQuery – a powerful set of javascript classes and functions that make writing javascript for your web applications a breeze.
  • Apache – an easy to use webserver for hosting all your php projects.
  • PHP – a serverside scripting language that allows to create our dynamic sites.
  • MySQL – my favourite database.
  • WampServer – a great WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack for development on a Windows machine.
  • Notepad++ – a quite powerful text editor that is great for coding.
  • Subversion – quite possibly the most important backup / versioning tool for any developer.
  • USVN – a great interface to Subversion which has project and user controls.
  • CentOS – my personal favourite linux distro, of course there are a lot of great ones out there but this one is essentially RedHat rebranded and repackaged.
  • TortoiseSVN – an excellent windows shell extension for using subversion.
  • FileZilla – relatively powerful FTP program.
  • Poderosa – great for creating a secure shell connection.
  • 7zip – a great piece of software for compression, is compatible with most formats.

I hope some of these packages can be useful to you.

]]> http://www.timhilliard.com/power-to-the-people/feed 0 Moodia goes Live! http://www.timhilliard.com/moodia-goes-live http://www.timhilliard.com/moodia-goes-live#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:25:36 +0000 timhilliard http://www.timhilliard.com/?p=31 After much blood, sweat and tears from the team at Moodia, we have relaunched our new website aimed at capitalising on the emergence of Conversion Rate Optimisation in the rapidly changing environment of websites.

Moodia website

Moodia website

The new site presents a striking yet clean interface with a focus on usability and in particular the navigation. Although not live yet, the Moodia site will also include a blog which will be a place where our intelligent team of optimisers can share their wealth of knowledge. If you are looking to get better results out of your website, head on over to Moodia and see what website optimisation can do for you.

]]> http://www.timhilliard.com/moodia-goes-live/feed 0 My Big Move http://www.timhilliard.com/my-big-move http://www.timhilliard.com/my-big-move#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:00:33 +0000 timhilliard http://timhilliard/?p=3 So I packed my bags not so long ago and headed over to London where I now live. Wow, what a change, a great change though. But by far the biggest surprise for me was the job I managed to land, I think I’ve hit the jackpot. My hat goes off to the staff at Moodia for their positive and enthusiastic approach.

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