His Hers Money

After a long weekend in the coding trenches, immersed in the inner-workings of Wordpress, it looks as though I’m finally 99% happy with our little website. There’s still a little tweak or two to be made at some point but I’m not fretting about it. So what exactly was done?

Well, with Wordpress 2.5 released, I upgraded to that. Easily done as we were already running the pre-release version here. I also had become less than happy (already!) with the look of the site and rebuilt it by modifying the freely available Xplosive Reloaded theme from Blog Oh! Blog. Make sure you try out the different color schemes by using the links on the top-right! In trying to not completely geek out on everyone and in keeping with the personal finance theme, here’s a list of the tools I used and the cost associated with them. Note that I use a Mac so these programs may not be available to you.

• CSSEdit - Shareware - 29.95€ - A wonderful CSS editor that lets you extract styles directly from websites and edit them in real-time to see the results.
• GIMP - Open-Source - Free - If you don’t need to do a ton of image-editing or if you’re just too poor (like me) to purchase Photoshop, the GIMP is an excellent free alternative.
• Yummy FTP - Shareware - $25 - My favorite FTP program ever. Performance is good. Their folder sync feature is what I use to backup my websites. Transmit is another good yet more expensive alternative for Mac users and Cyberduck is an open-source alternative.
• TextMate - Shareware - 39€ - One of the leading text editors around. Fairly expensive, in fact the most expensive piece of software listed. But if you do any coding, from HTML, PHP, C++, etc… this is a great program. The best part for me is that it interacts with YummyFTP and lets me edit files directly on the web server. TextWrangler is a free version of BBEdit for those looking to save money.

You’ll notice that I use mostly shareware or open-source software. I find the quality to be just as good if not better than that of the giant software publishers. It also normally is much cheaper and I end up supporting small business owners that are passionate about their products.

For you other bloggers out there. What tools do YOU use to keep everything up and running?

Hello everyone and let me start off by welcoming you to our site. First, a little background: As our name says we are a His and Hers. We are in our early 30’s and starting off a life together as a “couple”. Being that we are already in our 30’s we both already have our own finances and lives so now we are in the process of merging them. Both of us bring some sort of debt to the table (who doesn’t these days), Hers has these pesky student loans and a car loan and Him has student loans, credit cards and a car note. Could it be any more fun than that???We live in the Washington DC area so housing is astronomical (not saying it’s cheap anywhere these days)! We rent an apartment in a high rise and the idea of buying what seems like 14 square feet for a cool million is not even in our near future!!! Both His and Hers have decent jobs and make a decent living and try very hard to keep our spending within our means.So here’s my current debt situation, His will post his separately and we will both cover assets in a later post. We are really just starting down the path of combining our finances so you, our readers, will be learning real time!