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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.

FeedMasher Project Finally Moving to Opensource

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

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

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
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 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.