Show HN: 30-second Slideshows for Hackers

Hey HN,

I recently started an Open Source club at my school, and one of the key aspects of the club is that I (along with a few others) give quick tech talks. I found that it took far too long to whip up a short slideshow, so I wrote this. Its entire purpose is to allow you to get something presentable and interactive out quickly.

It's sort of a two-birds type deal because we'll be actively working on this project through the club :)

I'd love to hear your feedback!

Exactly. I've been looking out for (and possibly missed) a tool to make a Reveal.js-ish slideshow [1] from just markdown rather than 'HTML with optional markdown in each slide'. This is that.

With Reveal.js you can do:

  <section data-markdown><script type="text/template">
    #markdown slide here
  </script></section>

But that's a bit of a hard-sell when I'm trying to open non-softie eyes to the benefits of markdown-everywhere (as they have to encounter HTML too). So yeah, I realise that a regex that replaces `---` with the above and hoicks it into a Reveal.js template is (almost) all that is needed to achieve what this project does, but I'm thankful for it all the same.

Worth noting that I've also used the `slideshow` gem [2] back in the day. This does basically the same thing as this project, and with the Google HTML5 Rocks [3] theme it isn't bad as a 'just markdown to slideshow' tool, but it was a bit fiddly to get started and 1) that homepage is a big undersell with all the old crappy themes/defaults on it and 2) I think their version of the Google deck is now pretty outdated (was buggy when I used it). Still, worth looking into for Rubyists I think.

[1] http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js

[2] http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/

[3] http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/tutorial.html5.html#slide1

This is a nice project. I wrote my own version earlier, but it was not nearly as slick! I wanted fancy SVG-based animations, but never got it to a working state.

Coincidentally, I think some subtle animation would be great--maybe just have the slides slide in or out. They are, after all, slides :P.

I currently use a very similar tool written for Emacs's org-mode. Org-mode is incredible. I mostly use it for notes; the slideshows are just another nice feature. I think the results[1] are quite good, given that it's just as easy as this except better-integrated into Emacs.

[1]: http://jelv.is/synthesis-slides.html

I put this presentation together at literally the last moment before speaking--I wrote the last slide just as the previous speaker was taking questions. Despite the bad timing, I think it worked reasonably well.

It's great, but I do sometimes have to modify the CSS for certain slides by hand. Happily, this is very easy, and I have never needed anything complicated.

I use a modified version of an elisp script written by some Googlers[2], but org-mode can output slides with a bunch of other backends[3] like Beamer or S5. You can even use Emacs itself to give the presentation! I've seen a presentation this way and while the aesthetics are questionable, it confers an undeniable hacker panache.

[2]: https://gist.github.com/kinjo/509761

[3]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/non-beamer-presentatio...

I had a play and it seems really neat, congratulations. I ran "watch -n0.2 cleaver presentation.md" to preview changes, but there is probably a better way to do it with some sort of filesystem watcher.

Seems similar to mdpress, a ruby script which I've used successfully.

https://github.com/egonSchiele/mdpress

Very nice. I would suggest adding url support to be able to go back and forth between slides (using browser's back/fwd button), emailing dirct link to certain slides, etc.

Why do hackers need this simplistic bullet point slides? Encouraging death by bullet point?

I could understand features like code-highlighting for hackers.

maybe can add export option viz to pdf

this needs mathjax