Firefox - 1st Quarter 2005

What is your New Year’s Resolution? Given that this is our first newsletter, can you guess what ours is? You got it…a quarterly newsletter about various technology subjects of interest.

The name for the newsletter, ClearPoint, came from the two driving forces that have guided our company from the very beginning. Be Clear and to the Point. To that end, you will notice that our newsletters will be very short and contain easy to read articles.

Please enjoy,
Neal Berry

A New Decade for Clearbuilt

Clearbuilt is very proud and excited to have provided over a decade of service to our clients. Here is a brief synopsis of our journey.

Some of you may know that Mike Weisenborn and I incorporated as ExpoNet, Inc. in November 1994 and started designing, developing, and maintaining websites. There were only a handful of web development companies around at that time. I’m proud to say that we are the only company that we’ve been able to find that is still in business.

In the wake of the dot-com era, the individuals and small companies that already had websites were feeling like road kill. They were left to fend for themselves by web developers that either were out of business or too successful to bother with small websites. The principals of ExpoNet seized the opportunity to help and implemented a walk-in website shop concept in Atlanta called WebSitesFast.com. The company was an initial success, but our flawed (read nonexistent) sales approach soon hindered growth.

ExpoNet sold itself through referrals. WebSitesFast.com did not. It’s probably no surprise to you, and shouldn’t have been to us, but what do you expect from a group of computer engineers? WebSitesFast.com was later closed and all of the clients were moved over to ExpoNet.

In the meantime, ExpoNet was performing more consulting and education services to the commercial construction industry so a corporate re-branding effort was undertaken. As a result, ExpoNet changed names to Clearbuilt Technologies in mid-2001. However, technology consulting work was squeezed from corporate budgets due to 9/11. Therefore, we have returned to our roots of website application development and hosting.

It has been a remarkable experience and we sincerely look forward to the next 10 years.

Firefox - A Great New Browser

Over 90% of the Internet population uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) browser to surf the web. That number is shrinking due to a new browser from Mozilla called Firefox. There are many reasons to make the change to Firefox, such as a built-in popup blocker and security. In order to keep this short I will cover only one reason, but it is enough.

Tabbed Browsing

Firefox allows you to have multiple websites open in the same browser window under separate tabs. One of the many benefits to this is apparent when you are using a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, etc). Let’s say I wanted to find a website that would give me information on how I can volunteer to help the Tsunami victims. I would open Firefox, type “Tsunami volunteer help victims” into built-in Google search box and hit enter. The results would be presented in the browser window/tab.

I could then select, for example, 3 of the search results that I want to read. Each time I click on a result using my middle mouse button the web page starts loading in a new tab, but I remain on the tab with the Google search results. Notice the 3 new tabs just under the web address line.

I can then click on each tab to read about helping the Tsunami victims. In this case I have clicked on the first new tab (second tab from left). When I’m finished with this site then I can click on the next tab (American Red Cross). I can even bookmark the group of 4 tabs.

I no longer have to repeatedly hit my back button to get back to the search results to select another website. The time savings is significant. While it is true that Firefox is not the first browser to use tabs, it is the best when you consider all of the other browser features.

Go to http://www.mozilla.org/ for more information.

Filed by nb on March 7th, 2005 under ClearPoint