Slideshare embeds without Flash

I’ve said it a few times before, but I love Slideshare. For a professional speaker like me it is a great way to share my decks and get feedback from people allowing them to re-use. The thing that some people complained about is that the embed is Flash based and as we all know Flash makes kittens cry and Ninjas visible so we can’t have that.

Don’t fret though as there is a way out. Say you have a presentation on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/reasons-to-be-cheerful-fronteers-2010:

Simply add a /mobile/ before the user name to see the mobile version which is images with a bit of HTML:

You could just slap this in an iframe but the chrome of the mobile version can be a bit overwhelming. No worries – the open web can fix that. Looking at the source code, you find a JSON object with all the info:

The interesting parts here are the baseSlideUrl and the totalSlides. To get the different images, just add —slide—{n}.jpg to the baseSlideUrl with {n} being the number of the slide.

Putting this together, adding some styling and a dash of YUI3 for functionality I can now present you with the embeddable HTML version:

Go to http://icant.co.uk/slidesharehtml and simply enter the URL of the slides to convert them. The source code of the converter is on GitHub so you can host it yourself.

See the flow in the following screencast:

I love open web technologies and clever converters, don’t you?

Tags: converter, embeds, flash, HTML, slideshare