yergler.net » slides http://yergler.net Because eventually I'll be right. Theoretically. Wed, 23 May 2012 01:10:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 hieroglyph: Easy, Beautiful Slides with Restructured Text http://yergler.net/blog/2012/03/13/hieroglyph/ http://yergler.net/blog/2012/03/13/hieroglyph/#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:31:16 +0000 Nathan Yergler http://yergler.net/?p=2028 I was happy to have my talk proposal accepted for PyCon this year, and happy with the feedback I received on my talk (Django Forms Deep Dive). But as I was putting my talk together the distracting question was not, “what should I say”, but “what should I say it with”. As a mentor once pointed out, “it’s more fun to write programs to help you write programs than it is to write programs.” The corollary I found over the past couple weeks: “it’s more fun to write programs to help you write slides than it is to write slides.”

I was putting together notes using reStructured Text and kept thinking that it’d be nice to generate both slides and longer written documentation from the same source. I’ve used docutils’ S5 generator in the past, but was looking for something a little more polished looking. Something like the HTML5 Slides.

So I wrote a hieroglyph, a Sphinx builder for generating HTML5 Slides. I presented hieroglyph at the Sunday morning lightning talks at PyCon: you can see the slides, the reStructured Text source, as well as the HTML documentation generated from the same source.

I’m really happy with the output — it looks great in the browser, projects well, and because I’m using the html5slides CSS, looks great on mobile devices, too. I’m even happier that I’m able to work on my content in plain text. You can find the source on github.

]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2012/03/13/hieroglyph/feed/ 1 Slides For All Audiences http://yergler.net/blog/2009/02/18/slides-for-all-audiences/ http://yergler.net/blog/2009/02/18/slides-for-all-audiences/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:13:34 +0000 Nathan Yergler http://yergler.net/?p=1020 Tufte tells us that filling our slides with reading material is bad form. I try to keep this in mind when putting together talks (with varying degrees of success), and am reminded of it when I attend a conference. Usually there’s at least one presenter who has really compelling material, but terrible slides. The thing is, they’re probably great slides for certain audiences; namely, the audience not in the room. If you’re reading them after the fact, text heavy slides can give you the full picture, where arguably Lessig-style slides (on their own) can not.

Slideshare, an online site for publishing your slides, has a feature that’s new to me: “slidecasting”.

Slidecasting 101

Slidecasting involves taking an audio track and syncing it with your slides, giving you the best of both worlds. Right now it requires uploading an separate MP3 file and manually syncing it with your slides. Extra effort on the presenter’s part, but arguably worth it if you’re trying to reach the broadest possible audience with the greatest efficacy.

It’d be great if Slideshare supported some standard ["SMIL?" he asks with no real insight into the specification] that allowed you to upload the synchronization information without using their web-based tool. You can imagine an application or plugin that records during a presentation, noting timestamps for slide changes, and generates a set of files immediately suitable for upload.

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