Coding a presentation

June 03, 2016

tinkering, presentations, markdown, html, reveal.js

I recently ran across a set of online presentation slides with a readable, responsive design. I took a look at the source, and it seemed like they were written with R. Presentations in HTML/Markdown? Wow. More things to turn into text!

I started to think about preparing presentations, and perhaps instructional tutorials in text, using markdown — i.e., coding my presentations. Why? ¹

I did a little tinkering and looking around and decided to start by trying out Reveal.js. Here’s what I did

1. Cloned Reveal.js to make a local copy.
2. Created a new branch of the repository for this site called presentations to experiment.
3. Created a presentations directory at the root of the site.
4. Copied reveal.js files into the new presentations directory ².
5. Navigated to the local repository in terminal and did jekyll serve to make sure I could test this out. Works!
6. Started thinking about a naming convention for presentations. Also thinking about whether or not I should try to use a jekyll naming convention for the presentation files (i.e., treat them like jekyll posts) and then try to make an index.html page to fit in w/ the rest of the site…. would that be better? It would automatically update index.html as new presentations are created….
7. Realized I don’t know enough about how to do that yet, so decided to start by just manually linking to presentations from current index.html works well enough ….

Here’s an example embedded in an iframe:

See full version

Here’s some demos from w/in this jekyll site

Here’s what it looks like so far

1. It is similar, I think, to the reasoning behind making a switch from WordPress to Jekyll — it seems nice to switch to simpler tools, and keep content in simple, and hopefully more enduring formats. ↩

2. I’m still wondering if I should use the sub-module feature for this sort of thing ….? ↩