Adding slides to gh-pages

I’ve previously used some external services to write my slides (either Publisher, slides.com, or jupyter notebook). I really wanted to move to something which could be put under version control* and hosted on my gh-pages site (this one!).

Firstly I want to say I’m not ecstatic with the arrangement I’m about to describe, but nonetheless it works…

Using remark.js

remark is a “markdown-driven” slide tool. You link to the minimified javascript, add some css, and you’re away:

var slideshow = remark.create({
  sourceUrl: 'content.md',
});

where content.md is a markdown file with horizontal rules (---) to denote new slides. Easy peasy.

Repo layout

I created a new repository for my slides, which I somewhat cryptically called s. For the uninitiated, this means, if you have a gh-pages branch, a get request asks for hayd.github.io/s/* it hits this repository.

1. Set the index.html to redirect to the hayd.github.io#slides.
2. Create a talk_title directory with an index.html and a content.md. (When a user visits hayd.github.io/s/talk_title, they are shown the slides from talk_title/content.md.
3. Add links to your slides in your main gh-pages.

Notes

1. I already have my 404 page set up to redirect to the home page, after 5 seconds, if it hits a bad URL. This is inherited by /s.

2. There is a lot of repetition here, especially the index.htmls and adding the list of slides manually to your site. It would be nice to have this generated with jekyll (I haven’t looked into this)…

(It seems like the above, wrapping Jekyll and remark.js would be a really useful project.)

Perhaps there’s all ready be something out there and my googling failed?

Aside / the future

Upon researching this post I found that there is package, RISE, which creates “live” slides using the jupyter back-end. This could actually be the perfect solution for presenting…

It doesn’t have very much documentation at the moment, but this demonstratation shows some of the power and easy of use:

RISE, jupyter slides.

This along with web-based python connection (e.g. wakari) will be a fantastic slideshow tool.

*Version control can work with jupyter notebook.