Christian Heilmann

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Archive for June, 2008

SlideShare List WordPress Plug-In

Monday, June 30th, 2008

I wanted to give a list of all my presentations on SlideShare right here on the blog and started playing with the SlideShare API in earnest. As I failed in just including my results in the blog, I wrapped them in a WordPress plug-in in case you also feel like listing your SlideShare achievements.

You can see the plugin in action on the presentations page and here’s a screenshot:

screenshot of my list of presentations created with the slidesharelist plugin for wordpress

Notice that I am offering a link to Easy SlideShare as an option so that blind users can only go to the transcript instead of having to try to understand the Flash embed. The API actually has a transcript element, but there is no content in there right now. Would be cool to see it enabled :)

Update: The Plugin now also allows you to copy and paste the “WordPress” code from SlideShare into any WordPress blog running this plug-in.

Simply copy and paste the wordpress code provided by slideshare into any blog post running this plugin to have a fancy display

This screenshot shows what the inital state of a post (with some CSS) looks like:

screenshot of a SlideShare presentation shown with this plugin (closed state)

When you click the “here and now” link you get the “normal” SlideShare experience:

screenshot of a SlideShare presentation shown with this plugin (display state)

The plug-in is open source, BSD licensed and if you want to use it you need to get a developer key from SlideShare

Once you have those, simply change the variables in the slidesharelist-config.php file accordingly. Say SlideShare gave you a key of “minor” and a secret of “I really like Weird Al Yankovic” then you’ll have to change:


$key = ‘YOUR KEY’;
$secret = ‘YOUR SECRET’;
$apiurl = ‘http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/’;
?>

to the following:


$key = ‘minor’;
$secret = ‘I really like Weird Al Yankovic’;
$apiurl = ‘http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/’;
?>

That’s all you need to do, simply FTP the whole folder over to your plugin directory of WordPress and activate the plugin inside WordPress.

All you need to display your list of presentations in a blog post or page is to add the following:

[*slideshare-username-amount]

For example the following would show my latest 5 slides:

[*slideshare-cheilmann-5]

The other option you have is to copy and paste a single presentation into the blog post. You can either use the following syntax:

[*slideshare-presentation:url]

An example would be my “Creating Happy Little Web Sites” presentation:

[*slideshare-presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/creating-happy-little-websites]

Alternatively you can use the copy and paste code slideshare offers you for blogs hosted on slideshare from the SlideShare presentation page itself. For example my presentation “Yahoo is Open for Developers” from the Ankara Open Source event:

[*slideshare id=477388&doc=opensourceankara-1213971414957829-9&w=425]

This is taken from:

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/yahoo-is-open-to-developers

New in 1.10:

As requested in the comments below, you can now also list slideshows for tags and groups. The syntax is the following:


[*slideshare-group:{group}:{amount}]

For example:


[*slideshare-group:yahoo-developer-network:3]

And if you want to see slides for a certain tag:


[*slideshare-tag:{tag}:{amount}]

For example:


[*slideshare-tag:ajax:3]

Creating Happy Little Web Sites – my tech talk at the Guardian

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Here’s a presentation I have given today at the Guardian office in London. In it I am covering the different great ideas I found out about developing web sites. Check the presentation here:

[slideshare id=488632&doc=happylittlewebsites-1214566328957709-8&w=425]

The Guardian have recorded my talk and will release it on the Inside Guardian blog

Scripting Enabled is what keeps me busy

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

I am very happy to announce that I am organizing my first big event. After years of fighting the good fight and getting people to embrace accessibility I was ready to give up on it. Instead I took a new angle on it and used APIs to create alternative interfaces to systems that just will not get more accessible any time soon.

Readers of this blog will have seen the outcome of these, and last weekend at mashed08 I showed another hack and explained the idea of it. I also gauged if there was any interest by the assembled hackers in an event like this and got some good response.

Even better was that I won a prize – some financial support to get an “accessibility hack day” on the road.

So here goes, check out Scripting Enabled

Scripting Enabled is a conference and hack day in London, England in September 2008.

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time – let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

Right now I am still looking for, well, everything. I have some money, I need a location and other speakers. I got a lot of ideas, though.

Check out the site, the calls for participation and if you want to help, please contact me!

Video of my talk at the University of Ankara

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Kivanc Erten has shot a video of my talk at the Open Source Event in the University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, Turkey explaining what free open resources Yahoo has for developers:

[slideshare-presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/yahoo-is-open-to-developers]

Part 1: Yahoo is Open

Part 2: Yahoo is Open

Easy SlideShare (my hack entry for mashed08)

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

I am just sitting at Mashed 08 and just released my hack for the event – an easier interface to SlideShare.

Easy SlideShare

SlideShare is a great place to publish your presentations on the web. Uploaded Powerpoints and PDFs get converted to Flash movies you can embed in your blogs and web sites.

SlideShare also automatically creates a transcript of the presentation in HTML format, which is quite cool, but hidden far down the page and hard to reach in a screen reader. Easy SlideShare retrieves this information and shows it in an easier accessible manner.

As with EasyFlickr and Easy YouTube all you need to do to show a SlideShare presentation in Easy SlideShare is to add the URL at the end of the Easy SlideShare URL:

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/purple-hack-fodder

http://icant.co.uk/easy-slideshare/?slides=http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/purple-hack-fodder

You can try it out with my mashed08 presentation

Easy SlideShare is Open Source, licensed with BSD, and you can download it here: