Mar
02
2010

Building Slides with Ease

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Hands-Free Slide Decks

Presentations have a very big limitation – they’re fleeting. As passionate as you may be, you need to ensure that the content you’re trying to pass along stays with your audience. For some talks, a video recording may be sufficient. In my particular area, code snippets and slide handouts are almost a necessity.

As an ideal, I’d like to be able to take my content, and be able to painlessly derive:

  • A presentable set of slides
  • A slidedeck that can be hosted to be reviewed later
  • An outline view of the presentation content
  • A PDF of slides that can be printed and distributed
  • A code repository for any demos
  • A text file of any code snippets used in the presentation
  • Incidental thumbnail images and description text

Much of this can be done using free services like GitHub and Heroku, so we’ll postpone talking about headless Firefox and Selenium, and spend the first half of the tutorial examining just how we can begin creating an integrated environment.

Read the full post »

Nov
12
2009

A Curious Use For Selenium – Slideshows

As a cheap, and tech-agnostic developer, I’ve particularly enjoyed using the Slideshow (S9) gem to create my slidedecks for various presentations I’ve given. Thanks to some phenomenal jQuery, I’m able to write up my talks in Markdown, generate an HTML page, and give my talk directly from the browser.

But I’m a lazy, cheap, tech-agnostic developer. To make things a bit easier, I went to the trouble of creating a continuous build system on my private git repository, that creates my HTML page when I commit the Markdown file, pushes it out to http://slides.kevingisi.com/presentation, and no manual building for me anymore.

There was a problem, however. While S9 will gracefully degrade into an outline format, there was no real way for me to display a nice thumbnail version of the slides. I was left with no distributable of my slidedeck. And sadly, Internet Explorer users were unable to view my slides, because S9 is utterly incompatible with IE (read: S9 was written in the past 10 years).

Enter Selenium! After a bit of setup, I was able to get Selenium working with Firefox-headless, to grab a screenshot of each slide in the slidedeck. Selenium, Firefox-headless, and Xvbf let me grab snapshots of each of my slides, and ImageMagick created a PDFTo make this easy, I took a copy of @jeffrafter’s Crocodile gem, made a few modifications (mainly, executing Javascript calls to advance slides before taking screenshots), set up the X virtual frame buffer out on my server (big thanks to this tutorial: Running Selenium Headless), and boom! Now, I’ve got PNG images of every slide in the deck, ready and available. Throw in a little ImageMagick (convert slide_*.png slide.pdf), and now I’ve got a fine distributable that can be uploaded to SlideShare, printed off, copied, and viewed by Internet Explorer users. Just take a look at the results!

Ruby on Rails: The Third Age

The Ruby on Rails framework is going through some radical changes. Not only are we on the cusp of Rails 3, but new technologies like InheritedResources and Formtastic allow us to do things we never could have dreamed of before. Have you seen Ryan Bates’ tutorial on building a blog in 15 minutes in Rails? Let’s cut that down to five.

Together, we’ll take a look at some of the new gems and plugins that have been released, along with some of the upcoming changes with Rails 3 to see how this technology can make your development experience even easier.

Associated Resources
Slides: HTML | PDF
SpeakerRate
Dates and Locations
Chippewa Valley Code Camp—November 14, 2009

Selenium has notoriously been used for integration testing, and @jeffrafter used it to grab screenshots of submissions for the Rails Rumble 2009, but this modification makes browser-based Slideshows even more accessible!

Oct
25
2009

Firefox Extension Under New Management

Last Friday, I received a phone call from The Pragmatic Programmers, my publisher on the Firefox Extensions: Tools for Productivity book. Unfortunately, they decided it was no longer in their best interest to continue with my book, so Prags and I are parting ways.

I’d like to thank Dave & Andy for their support as I began developing this book, and their helpful feedback as I’ve gone through various revisions. I would also really like to extend my appreciation to my editor Susannah Pfalzer, who was extremely helpful in guiding me toward reshaping the book toward a more effective product. While I wish that we could continue working together, your help was extremely valuable and appreciated.

I am pleased to announce that I will continue writing the Firefox Extension book as planned. I’ll be moving the existing content into DocBook, and continue writing. I’m looking forward to seeing this book come to fruition, and I’ve got a number of supportive individuals who are eager to review and refactor. While I’m currently on the prowl for a new publisher, I’m prepared to self-publish this book if that doesn’t happen.

If anyone would be interested in helping edit or review, as I push forward with this text, it would be much appreciated—let me know in the comments. Thanks in advance for your support!

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