---
title: Open Source Slides
teaser: Techniques for improving your presentation slides.
tags: news,web,open source,ruby,javascript
author: Dan Croak
published_on: 2009-07-23
---
In August, our training program hits the road at [Lone Star Ruby
Conf](http://lonestarrubyconf.com/) in Austin, TX. Registration for our
[September Ruby on Rails training](http://rubyonrails.eventbrite.com) is also
now open. It marks our **one-year anniversary** of running [Ruby on Rails
training](http://thoughtbot.com/services/training) classes!
We've learned as much as our students. I'd like to focus on one area: slides.
- **Problems with slides**
The format of our class is workshop-oriented, with lectures leading into
each workshop. Over time, the lectures built up an arsenal of over 1150
slides.
- **No portability, not open source**
The slides were all in Keynote but not everyone at thoughtbot is on OS X.
- **Style**
Achieving beautiful syntax highlighting involved a dance of writing the code
in Textmate, then copying as RTF using
[Dr. Nic's bundle](http://github.com/drnic/copy-as-rtf-tmbundle).
Changing our design of the slides would be painful. We use master slides,
but this could be better.
- **Not executable**
If we wanted to run the code, we had to copy it back into an editor or shell
to run it. Sometimes there are hidden characters that come along for the
ride. Ruby freaks out on these characters.
- **No regression suite**
Slides tend to be error-prone and we don't have a regression test suite for
it.
- **Format conversion**
Delivering PDFs to students is time-consuming since the rate of change for
slides is high and the conversion-and-sharing process is slow.
- **Versioning**
Versions are non-existent. Trying to maintain Keynote slides in git, our
preferred version control system, is good for backups but bad for diffs.
There may be better tools out there for versioning these kind of files, but
why bother? I'd rather use our familiar file-based tool.
## Solutions
A few weeks ago, I began converting Keynote slides into Markdown. The process is
simple: run `*.md` files through
[slidedown](http://github.com/nakajima/slidedown) by Pat Nakajima.
gem install slidedown
vim tdd.md
Create some slides quickly and easily:
```md
!SLIDE
## why automated tests?
!SLIDE
* prevent regressions
* prove functionality with executable code
* enable refactoring
* think about the interface before implemenation
```
Then convert:
slidedown tdd.md --template=import > tdd.html
[Example output](http://nakajima.github.com/slidedown)
## Open source, familiar tools
This generates HTML markup that
can be manipulated in the usual way: CSS for style and Javascript for behavior (transitions).
We can continue using git. Look at this beautiful diff!
## Integration with business processes
We looked at the PDF conversion
process as a business process problem. I had been scp'ing HTML syllabuses and PDFs to one of our servers and
pointing students to that URL.
This was a lightweight solution at the beginning that hasn't scaled well over
time.
Now that the core materials have been converted to our most-natural formats, we
decided to create a legitimate training application.
```ruby
class SlideshowsController < ApplicationController
before_filter :authenticate, :authorize
def show
if file_exists?(file)
render :file => file
else
render :nothing => true, :status => 404 and return false
end
end
protected
def file
File.join(directory, "#{params[:id]}.html")
end
def directory
File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "app", "views", "slideshows")
end
def file_exists?(path)
File.file?(path)
end
end
```
Using a similar pattern that we use for `PagesController` (static pages like
about and contact us) and using
[Clearance](http://github.com/thoughtbot/clearance) for authentication, we
quickly had the start to our application.
The possibilities from here are many... automated tests?
We hope to bring together more business processes that have grown out of the
training program over the last year into a system based on tools that we use
every day.
Visit our [Open Source page](https://thoughtbot.com/open-source) to learn more about our team's contributions.