Slide Shows uploaded and ready to roll

One of the things I wanted to do when I set this site up was provide some of the content I have put together over the last couple of years. As an active member (and now President) of the Washtenaw Linux Users Group, I have done various presentations for our monthly meetings. I have also done presentations at our local Penguicon convention. And I thought I wanted to make them available to anyone who can use them (like all of this site, these presentations are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license). [BTW, if you can figure out a way to make money from this, let me know, we can work out a deal. I am not opposed to making money, I just want my cut.]

Well, simply uploading the presentations and putting a link to them is pretty simple, and I knew how to do that. But I thought there should be a better way. After all, I see slide shows run on other web sites, so it knew it was doable. and after overcoming an obstacle or two, I have them up on my site as well. Here is how I did it.

First, I set up an account at Slideshare. This is kind of like YouTube, only for presentations. I liked that they supported OpenOffice.org as well as Microsoft Office, so they got points from me for that. The account is free, and like YouTube you can upload your presentations free of charge. So far so good. Then I discovered something even better, that you can embed the slide shows in WordPress, which is what I use for this site.

So, I installed a plugin for WordPress, called SlideShare, by Joost de Valk. With this I could drop the embed code on any page and have it run. then I created a page, went to SlideShare, and got the code. This part is easy, just open the presentation you want, click the WordPress code underneath presentation, and copy it onto your page. Save the page with the code, and you are good to go.

Well, almost. The first thing I discovered is that SlideShare actually takes your presentation and converts it to a Flash video. Which for me means I cannot watch it on my Kubuntu box right now, since I cannot seem to get any usable Flash stuff working in my browser. I had to open a browser in Windows to see how it worked. I hate when that happens. When I did open it up, I discovered that one presentation had a changed background that made it unwatchable, and that all of my presentations had lost their bullets. This turned out to be an old and known problem with OpenOffice.org presentations, and one that apparently no one at SlideShare considered important enough to fix. But there turned out to be an excellent work-around that solved both problems. I converted all of my OpenOffice.org presentations to Adobe PDF files first, then uploaded the PDF files into SlideShare. This time everything worked like a charm. With the technology in place, I got all of my presentations uploaded and now you can view them too.

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