Dancing Bear Syndrome is a term coined by Jared Spool and Alan Cooper (among others in the usability community). Someone says, "Look! A dancing bear!" And you are amazed! The bear is dancing! How cool is that?

Of course, bears don't dance well. It's just amazing that they dance at all. The novelty of it all is what catches our attention, not the quality of the dancing.

Alternative Joomla administrator templates are dancing bears.

The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits:

My last entry here was inspired by the possible use of sh404sef in the site we just launched (YAY!). We ultimately decided against using it for this site. Despite many great features that would make it a valuable addition to any site there were just too many issues I couldn't address in the time frame available before launch.

The initial motivating factor that made us  look into it was a need to handle "404  page not found errors". Joomla 1.5 (J!15) does have the ability to handle these, but the additional facility to handle sef urls and reporting on site activity related to hack attempts and failed page access attempts are really exciting.

Unfortunately, the sef urls require specially written  functions for any extensions in use on the site through a sef_ext file. On this site, we are using Virtuemart and Azrul's MyBlog, both of which are supported out of the box by sh404sef. rsGallery2, another extension we are using might be supported through an older sef_ext written for the J!10 version, but I didn't have a chance to pursue this. And from what I could tell on their forum, rsg2 isn't yet supported in J!15. Additionally, there are a couple extensions I wrote for this site in addition to JoomSuite, none of which are supported at all.

The first pane of the first page of the comic book on Google Chrome says this:

"Today, most of what we use the web for on a day-to-day basis aren't just web pages, they're applications."

Ok, pop quiz: How many people's favorite non-technical friend has any clue what a web application (or any kind of computer application) is? What is a definition?

Yesterday, Google announced it was releasing its own open-source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Microsoft, called Google Chrome.  The big links include:

• The main Google Chrome web page (link not working as of this writing)
• A comic book describing what Google is doing with this new browser
• Screenshots of what Chrome will look like.

My initial reaction?  Why the heck would Google want to release a web browser?  If they want to support an open source web browser, why not look at Firefox?

Now that I've thought on this a little longer, and seen the screenshots, and waded through the never-ending comic book, here's a few thoughts.