Creative Synthesis Blog

Talking about Creativity as Combination, The thoughts and works of the Creative Synthesis Collaborative.

Feed Subscriptions

RSS FeedRSS Things
RSS Comments

Present This Blog

A Friendly Note

To support us, Make a Donation - we rely on private donations for our operating costs, things like paying salaries and stipends, office space, and even post-its.

Things by Category

Things by Month

This thing was constructed on May 17, 2008, and it was categorized as General.
• You can follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback.

Presenting is a unique kind theme for Wordpress 2.3 / 2.5+ Presenting is a best described as a supplemental contextual theme, designed to compliment your blog’s regular theme.

The idea is that a lot of us are increasingly giving talks and presentations where the majority of the content is already on our blogs. Why bother making a set of powerpoint files? Doing that takes away all the things that make the blogs great - updated content, comments, feeds and the like. Presenting is designed to allow you to present directly from your blogs.

Why a theme? Well the ideal solution would be to use the media type ‘projection’ for css, but unfortunately only opera supports it. It also does make sense to make some structural and functional changes when looking at slides that aren’t currently well supported with css. The other thing is that most themes have wildly different structural content, and having this kind of ‘contextual theme’ allows anyone to use it regardless of the the theme structure.


Organization: The best way to organize a slideshow is probably by categorizing the posts one desires into categories. You can also use tags or (if you plan on presenting everything in a particular date range) the data based archive functions.

Keyboard Control: Mousing around during the talk can be a pain. That’s why real slide shows are controlled by remote (or at least a jab at the keyboard). The slides are set up to be controlled by your keyboard. A and Z move back and forward between slides. The number keys select individual slides from index or category pages. We also imagine you might one to jot down some other keys depending on your platform. Things like PageUp and Down (or just hitting the Spacebar on the mac) allow you to advance through slide content. Similarly having the increase font size key handy will help you set up the optimal viewing.

Inline Links and Content: We try to avoid state changes as much as possible. We use fancybox in the theme to make links to webpages, images, etc. that are within the main post content open up in an iframe on top of the presentation. This keeps you from losing your place within the main body of the presentation.

Chronological Ordering: The index page lists posts in the same order you would find them on your blog. This makes sense to ease the transition to the slide view. Searches are ordered similarly. Posts by categories, date and tags, however, are chronologically ordered. This makes sense from a slide addition standpoint. Newer slides are the ones you want to show later in the talk. So for posts categorized as “creativitytalk” the first posts would be the one from April 1st, the second from April 7th, and so on.

Control what you present: By default Presenting includes a number of styles in the presenting.css to customize the display of your content. For example, adding the class ‘present-hide’ to something will make it not display in the presenting theme, hiding it from slide view. If you want to be more semantic about this (and your content is marked up accordingly) just define what objects shouldn’t be displayed in presenting or should be displayed differently.

Check it out.

This thing was constructed by .
Matthew is the Director of the Collaborative. He writes rarely, and that makes him sad.

• You can follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*