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?

Well things are starting to look a little better around here. At least if you’re using any web browser except for IE6. For those of you that haven’t upgraded yet, there will be a few issues on this site because of the CSS code that I’m using. I’ve test in IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. They all handle it well and I’m confidant that most of the people who will be visiting should get the correct look.

We’re not using much in the way of images so hopefully everything will load pretty quickly. However, if you are having any problems, please let me know and I’ll try to correct them.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Well since HERS hasn’t posted anything yet in order to make sure everything is working around here I guess that I will have to do the honors. The domain has been purchased, the DNS points to our server now, and the basic Wordpress install has been completed. I’ll be taking some time the next two days to modify the Grid Focus theme from Derek that we’re going to be using.

Expect future posts from me to continue to be slightly nerdy as I discuss ways to minimize money spent on such things as video games, poker, and electronics. Plus HERS is already pretty darn good with her money, at least when it comes to putting away money for retirement. Me? Well let’s just say that I have a thing or two to learn about living within my means. This blog will hopefully document our journey through combining finances and the issues that people with different financial situations go through.