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About John-Paul Takats

A lecturer at RIT teaching web development and programming classes to grad and undergrad students. An IT Professional with a strong focus in higher education. Primarily focused on the web; a full-stack developer who has managed all parts of the development cycle.

From Code to Community (Video)

Submitted byJohn-Paul onFri, 04/05/2024 - 11:55
Code to community
Checkout my recent talk at RIT, I will share my experiences of transforming a typical group project that was done with a made-up client / topic into a collaboration between graduate students and local non-profit organizations in Rochester. The heart of this talk lies in sharing the successes, challenges, and lessons learned throughout this initiative. Although I don’t have an overwhelming amount of quantitative data, there will be some presented drawing from survey data collected from past students. Click Read More to view the video on youtube!

FeedMasher Project Finally Moving to Opensource

Submitted byJohn-Paul onWed, 07/20/2022 - 13:02
feedmasher panel

I am in the process of moving FeedMasher a web aggragation framework I have worked on for several years to open source. Details here: http://www.feedmasher.org/ Feedmasher is a system that is capable of gathering digital content from a wide array of sources such as traditional RSS feeds (ex: newsfeeds from cnn, bbc etc.)  Twitter tweets, Youtube Videos, Instagram and more.

A Personal Portfolio Page and Blog on The Open Web

Submitted byJohn-Paul onThu, 04/11/2019 - 20:35
walled garden

I recently stumbled upon a portfolio-style website that I liked, belonging to Dries Buytaert founder and lead of Drupal.  I specifically like the About me section and think I am borrowing a few ideas from how he arranged content about himself. I also seem to agree with many of his principles on open web, although I have never been able to publicly phrase it as eloquently.

Moving my site to Drupal?

Submitted byJohn-Paul onThu, 04/04/2019 - 22:28
hello world
As you may have noticed I am launching a new website.   After years of using Joomla, Wordpress, and just hand-written scripts I have decided to start setting up Drupal for my homepage. Although I have used Drupal periodically in the past, I wanted to get more up to speed with it as it is now used as RIT's main CMS.  Also I think it could be something I set up for future clients. It is a great tool, especially for tech-saavy developers, but at the same time I would be nervous about setting it up for clients as there seems to be a lot of set up time to get certain functionality that may be quicker to do with other systems that may have a component already built to solve a problem.

(Archive) Eye Tracking 101

Submitted byJohn-Paul onThu, 12/03/2009 - 10:31
eye image
Eye tracking sounds very elegant when one talks about studying a sites overall usability. However I found that it is very challenging to conduct. Part of the challenge is the technology itself is very fickle. Even on the $50,000 eye tracker we used there were still calibration problems, and bugs in the software.
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