Blog as slideshow - S5 and Movable Type
Today I spoke about the blogs@psu as part of the TLT talks series. The series is a chance for individuals around TLT to share and learn about different projects going on around TLT (the unit of ITS for which I work). Yesterday I was throwing together some slides for my presentation. As usual, I started collecting my thoughts in a text editor (TextMate, if you care). When it came time to make the slides, I started contemplating my options. Keynote? Just a webpage/blog with an outline and links? A series of blog entries? Since I was going to be talking about the nigh-unlimited uses for blogs, I thought it would be good to use blogs@psu to drive the presentation, but I still wanted to be able to page through the slides.
So, I threw together a quick template to output blog content as slides in S5, the web based slide show system. Check out the S5 slideshow, generated by our Movable Type. For reference, you can view the content in the familiar blog format, too.
How did I do it? I just added a new index template, set it output as s5.html, and used this as the content of the template. I could make it a little more fancy and use the excerpt/body as the printed notes/slide content, but I didn't get around to it. I also had to upload the ui folder for the theme I was using to my blog directory. We could take the tech work out of this for the users by building this into the default templates of our instance of MT.
I am also not sure if I want to create a new blog for each slide show. Maybe use categories or tags to separate slides into different shows. Would also make it easy to reuse slides from one show to another. Ordering the slides would be difficult in this case, though. The blogging interface also isn't the best for slideshow development. Imagine enabling comments and allowing a discussion to arise around your slides, though.
So, what do you think? Does blog as slideshow make any sense? Does anyone see any use for this?
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Brad manages the programming group in Education Technology Services.
I think it is terrific. I like the fact that it moves more of my thinking into my personal content management system. Nearly all of my writing ends up in my blog so having an opportunity to share a presentation from these is cool. I would want to be able to do this from a category as you mention. Yet another opportunity to attack.
Glad it went well.