All is Revealed

I had some issues with SEO Slides in the past, mostly around how it’s not quite what I need while also being more than I need and less. I banged around this for a while, before I remembered that I’ve seen a lot of people use WordPress for slides in a way that I never really loved, while others used something decidedly not WordPress.

Step back.

I don’t believe that I should use WordPress all the time just because I’m a WordPress person. I thought about what I want from my slides:

1. A way to load them locally or remotely
2. A way to control them and see my notes
3. Usable on mobile
4. Embed-able by me and me only
5. “SEO” friendly

That last one really means “HTML should be readable so a screen reader could make sense of it for the blind.” And that’s really the primary reason I ended up with SEO Slides to begin with. But when I stepped back to really think about what SEO Slides did, and what I needed, I realized that while I really do love it, it made it harder for me to make slides.

Let me explain. SEO Slides’ interface is not the WordPress post editor. I suspect, if it was, I’d be happy since I can mangle HTML there all day long. But SEO Slides doesn’t let you at the source code of the page, you have to use their GUI, and I was having a hell of a time with things like centering and floating and wrapping… All things I’m a boss at with HTML.

In addition, I’d recently discovered serious limitations with pageload, especially on mobile. The fixes in 1.5.0 didn’t fix it for me (actually it became worse with my slides taking over fifteen minutes to load, at which point I gave up). This is not to say I don’t love SEO Slides and what it does, it just didn’t fit my personal workflow. As much as I loved it when I did my EDD presentation for WP Sessions, I wasn’t satisfied.

So as I contemplated my vodka over Passover, I came to the possibility that maybe WordPress was totally overkill for slides. Maybe, like with a Gallery, it was too much and too complicated for something that should be more simple. To me, HTML is simple. It’s straight forward, direct, and I still use it every day. With the exception of paragraph tags, I wrote this post in HTML mode.

I did what comes naturally to me. I went and poked around what some of my friends have done (and kept up or not…) and finally decided that I was going to try out reveal.js.

Wow.

Installing was simple, just a git clone. And while the directions claimed you can’t use speaker notes unless it’s running locally, I found this not to be the case. Maybe it’s because I’m on Chrome, or maybe that’s not updated. Either way, it’s awesome for me since I can suddenly control my slide-deck on my laptop. Making my own slides was also pretty basic, I made a folder for each deck, tossed in the images and the index.html, and went to town. It’s really that easy to do, though I wish there was a basic, example, and not just the big one. Still, a search and replace of HTML is super fast.

It loads faster than SEO Slides, works better on my iPad, and the only thing I can’t do is embed. I’ll live. I’m also sure it can be done, since http://slides.com/ (the freeium version that hosts it for you) has an embed ability. The other massive gain is that it’s smaller. When you upload media to WordPress, you get multiple images, and I have to pre-load each page (or load it on the go). This gets heavy since I like background images and pretty things.

With reveal.js, I just upload one image and I’m done. It loads everything at once, since it’s one HTML page, and the image (while large) is just reused. And that was good enough for me. Also I get to use remotes.io to remote control my slides from my notes (I use the iPhone app Scan, by QR Code City, and paid for it because I hate ads).

I may go back to SEO Slides (who should consider an import from reveal… Hmmmm) but this works for me now. We’ll see if I love it in the long term. I suppose I should actually read stats and see if anyone but me even cares about the slides…

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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