SlideShare

I wanted to test out SlideShare, as I’ve seen a number of people I know post their presentations there…

I did a short presentation for Web414 in early 2007 called Lightbox JS (and Friends). I used S5 because I like S5, it’s XHTML/CSS, it’s standards-based, it lives on the web and gets indexed. Anyone with a browser can see it. It takes no special software to create or consume.

I managed to convert this to a format I could put into SlideShare, but it wasn’t easy. (See Lightbox JS (and Friends) on SlideShare.) This is what SlideShare has to say about formats:

We accept PowerPoint (ppt & pps), PDF, & OpenOffice (odp) files. If you are on a Mac and use Keynote, export to “PDF”.

So my complaint here is that anyone who plans put their stuff on SlideShare will most likely start with a proprietary and/or binary format. I know, I’m one of those crazy people who actually prefer HTML, but if SlideShare becomes the standard for sharing slides and presentations, it could be a bad thing.

The conversion process I went through involved doing screen captures of each page of my S5 presentation, which on the Mac created PNG files. I then converted those to PDF files, and combined them into a single PDF I could upload to SlideShare. This was a short presentation and it still took me way too long to do. What SlideShare needs is an S5 importer (or really, just an HTML importer) just give it a URL and let it import your existing presentation. That would be cool.

SlideShare is a nice service, and yes, they even support Creative Commons, which is a good thing. Hopefully they’ll continue to improve it, and eventually become supportive of us HTML-presentation freaks…