Here it is. My new M-Audio KeyStudio 49i, complete with Pro Tools M Powered 8!! Needless to say, I didn’t get any homework done this afternoon after I picked it up from the post office. Normally this keyboard doesn’t ship with Pro Tools – you have to buy it separately (about $300 from m-audio’s website). But we were able to get the keyboard I wanted with the software just “thrown in” for good measure for less than the normal selling price of the keyboard itself. Not a bad deal, eh?

I haven’t much chance to do much with it yet, but I have tried it out. I’ll let you know later what I really think of it – although my first impression is pretty much… “SWEET!” Thanks Dad and Mom for the early graduation present!

• 47 posts and 87 comments.
• 1,385 spam comments.
• thousands more link spam.
• 1 site design revision

Other notable accomplishments/projects hosted here were:

• My first WordPress plugin, wpSermons. This is a plugin intended for use in church websites that use WordPress to manage their content. It allows users to easily add mp3 sermons to their website at any time for all to listen to and download. Since its launch in May of ’07 it has been downloaded about 500 times and is being used on multiple church websites here in America and around the world (and even some non-church websites that found the audio uploader to be just what they were looking for). In fact, I saw one person who make his own audio plugin based off of mine. I thought that was cool.
• BJU Online March Madness Bracket Content. I had about 20-25 people join in on a March Madness bracket contest for BJ students/faculty/staff. Everyone paid an entrance fee and the money went entirely to the BJU Bible Conference offering which helped to pay for the completion of the parking garage as well as the new entrance to front campus. Participants logged into the site to set up their brackets and view their progress as the contest progressed.
• BJU Coffee Tycoon. This is probably my best programming achievement to date. I’ll let the site speak for itself, but here’s a little info. Between 80-100 different students (about 50 at the most at one time) were playing this game where the object to sell more coffee on BJU campus than your competitors. The game is played in real-time during the course of the semester. You choose a location on campus to be and start selling coffee. Campus events dictate which spot on campus is more popular at any given time. It’s a strategy game where you must determine what to sell, how much to sell it for, and where to sell it at while at the same time keeping an eye on your competition and using your profits wisely to outfit your coffee stand with “enhancements” that attract more people to buy from you. It was a lot of fun and I’ve talked to several people that told me they spent a few hours strategizing with their friends as to how best to play the game. They were very competitive to say the least! The best part is that it’s not time consuming as you might expect. If you’re a BJU student, try it out next semester. It will continue to run in future semesters as long as people like playing it.

All in all, not a bad year for PeterAnglea.com. I hope you enjoy reading this site as much as I enjoy putting stuff on it.

Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

(ESV)

They just had them printed today, and now the posters are hung all over campus. Click the thumbnail here to see a larger version. I created this poster with The GIMP in Ubuntu Linux. The font-face is Mg Open Cosmetica.

• Go to the site and click the link for the Windows ZIP file under the Download section.
• Extract the contents of the zipped folder
• Run (double-click) the .exe file included in the package. Wait a few seconds.
• This should install the screensaver with all the rest of your screensavers. You can adjust the settings however you please.

It’s cool, but I probably spend too much time looking at it while it’s running (which isn’t exactly the whole point of a screensaver). Enjoy!

Naturally, I will not be able to cover every minute detail about Safari here, nor will I try. But this browser is distinct enough that you don’t have to look very hard to find things you like or dislike about it. And that is how I am going to base this review – my likes and dislikes about Safari. I am also aware that Safari for Windows is still in beta. Obviously, Apple intends to do more work on it, but I shall review it in its current state nonetheless. I should also say that this is not a comparison of Safari for Mac vs. Safari for Windows as I have never used the Mac version. Let it be known that I am an avid Firefox user (and that I find IE7 more and more repulsive every time I open it). So you may see this review as being part “Safari vs. Firefox” and part “Safari vs. Itself.” If any browser is going to move me away from Firefox, it had better be pretty good.

So without any further ado, here’s a two-cents rundown of my likes and dislikes of Safari for Windows. Unfortunately for Safari, the “dislikes” outnumber the “likes.” But lets start with the good news first…

Likes

1. The loading indicator in the URL bar

This really makes sense and it helps clean up the status bar at the bottom.

2. Bookmarks made simple
Adding a bookmark is really quite simple with Safari. And the Add Bookmark button comes conveniently by default on the toolbar. As a side note, the small GUI effects of the drop down windows are sure to impress some people, but that’s really trivial to me.

3. RSS comes standard

The nice AJAX support in the RSS window makes it very user friendly. I like the ability to select the length of the article and quickly sort by date, source, etc. RSS really needs a helping hand in order to reach the Joe Blow general populous. This is very nice.

4. Slight difference in speed
I’m not sure this should be a major selling point for Safari… but Apple claims that it loads pages and Javascript 2x faster than IE and 1.6x faster than Firefox. To me, this difference is very slight, but I can detect it somewhat. It’s a bit more apparant with JavaScript. This might make all the pretty little Web 2.0 AJAX thingymabobs function with slightly enhanced efficiency.

Dislikes

It is unknown to me whether some of these dislikes are bugs or valid complaints. In either case, here’s a few things I’ve noticed that tick me off starting with the absolutely inexcusable and moving on to the smaller, i-can-probably-deal-with-this sort of things.

1. Window resizing without my consent
Here’s the scenario. I maximize the browsing window to full size, then minimize it. Every time I click the taskbar to open it back up, Safari brings the window back up un-maximized. This means that every time I minimize the browsing window, I have to re-maximize it every time I want to use it again. That’s dumb. It might not be a problem for some computers, but my maximum resolution on my 12″ IBM Thinkpad X40 is 1024×768 which means that I can’t view any website decently unless I either maximize the window or manually resize it.

2. No drop-down on the Back button

From time to time, I like to click the drop-down arrow on Firefox to back up multiple pages at once instead of backing up through multiple sites. The Safari Back button doesn’t give me this functionality.

3. What happened to Google Suggest?
This comes standard with Firefox. I have gotten quite used to seeing Google-suggested search results avail themselves to me time after time. Suffice it to say that Safari would do well to have this.

4. Textarea resizing
Ok. This could be handy, but to me it seems more ridiculous than anything. Especially since you can drag the box to be as big as you want. This destroys the layout of some pages if you resize it too much. As a webmaster, I design my textareas to be as big as I know they need to be without anyone needing to resize it for me. Another thing with textareas…

5. No spell-checker
Yeah, I like this feature in Firefox very much.

6. Scrolling Hindered
This almost makes me mutter under my breath every time it happens. Maybe it’s just a thing with my laptop, but I am unable to scroll the window with my TrackPoint (sorry, gotta take a side track – IBM’s TrackPoint has got to be the best invention for the laptop since the power plug. I love it so much more than a track pad. TrackPoint lets me move the mouse and type without having to move my hand…. soooo nice.). Anyways, now I have to manually drag the side scroll bar. That annoys me greatly.

7. No ad blocker
Firefox treats you right with the AdBlock Plus extension. No ads never… Safari doesn’t have this on the other hand. Which brings up another dislike….

8. No extensions/add-ons/themes/etc.
One reason why I love Firefox so much is the ability to extend its functionality with a broad array of extensions (or add-ons, or whatever you call them now). Safari comes up empty handed here, too, unfortunately.

9. I like the status bar, thank you…
I was thrown for a loop for a brief moment when I first started testing Safari. Perhaps it is just because I am a webmaster, but, I like to see where links take me before I click on them (don’t you?). I admit I must do this subconsciously most of the time. I had to manually add the Status Bar in Safari before I went any farther.

So in conclusion, I would say that although Safari has some very good things going for it, in the long run I am definitely staying with Firefox. I should also note that several vulnerabilities were found on the Windows version within hours of it being released.

Those are my thoughts. I’m interested to hear what others of you think about Safari whether you use it exclusively on a Mac, or have just started using it on your PC.

For more information, visit www.peteranglea.com/wpsermons/. I look forward to seeing people use it.

Update: Please leave all support questions on the WordPress site – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpsermons/ – so that all can benefit. Comments are closed here. I will try to post some help and/or updates to correct some bugs some users seem to be having.

• Custom Graphics
• Revamped Logo
• CSS Design
• Cross-browser compatibility
• PHP/MySQL/Javascript Photo Gallery
• Email Forms
• 80+ pages
• Site Map and Search Engine
• Custom Google Map

If you have a chance, visit the site and leave a comment here on what you think. Thanks!

BTW, you can see the rest of the xHTMLpro.com design portfolio here.

UPDATE: I liked the design so much, I decided to package it as a design template and upload it to the web. It’s a hit! At this point, after being online for only 2 days or so, it has been downloaded about 450 times and is currently the 5th most frequently downloaded template on OSWD.org. Whee! Get it here.

Why did I feel the need to have my own personal domain (branded with my name, no less)? The reasons are many.

• I’ve always wanted my own domain. But besides that . . .
• It’s becoming the norm for people nowadays to have a personal website/domain name for practical business and/or communication purposes. It is my hope that this website will be my virtual representative on the World Wide Web for a long time to come and that people (my family, most importantly) will be able to keep tabs on my business, my music, and my life in general.

Why do it now?

• Because of special discounts offered to me by my favorite webhost, SiteGround LLC.
• To give myself a Christmas present!
• Because domain names are getting snatched up faster than you would believe (even with a last name as “weird” as mine).

So here’s the low-down on this site.

• Powered by WordPress as a Content Management System. I originally was looking to have WordPress power only this small blog on the home page, but decided to expand it and use it to its full capacity. This required that I . . .
• Make my own WordPress template. This is actually the first template I have cooked up for WordPress. I think it works pretty well. The actual design is a slight modification of a template entitled nonzero by NodeThirtyThree design that I found at OWD.
• This site is Valid XHTML. You should view this site with at least a 1024px resolution so as to avoid seeing only half of the site at once.

One other thing you should know. I love getting feedback! So please leave comments, contact me, email me, whatever! I look forward to hearing from you about what I put on my site. Thanks again for visiting!