For the upcoming Pittsburgh Perl Workshop in Oct and YAPC::NA 2009 I want to offer a speaker mentor program.
I really don't know how I am going to do this just yet, but one thing I know is, I will need is slideware suggestions for potential speakers.
What do people like and why do they like it? This is asked from the perspective of the speaker and as an audience member.
Wikipedia has not let me down it does give me a decent start but I would like to see what the Perl community has experienced.
Presentation Programs on Wikipedia
I've put together quite a few presentations as HTML slides using a script I wrote that you can download from here. The notes.txt files should get you going but feel free to email me any questions. The themes directory contains some short sample presentations to demo a range of different slide layouts. There's a snippet of JavaScript that allows you to hit space to advance to the next slide so you don't have to fumble around with you mouse clicking on the arrows.
I wrote an article about this system in a recent Perl Review. The main advantage for me is that because I create the presentation in a text editor I'm not tempted to waste time tweaking font sizes and other distractions that are very much 'in your face' with a program like Powerpoint. I also like that I can dump the files on a web server or a USB stick and access them from any machine without special software.
HTML slides are easy to publish online which is generally a good thing for users. They can also be indexed readily by search engines and if you put code samples in them it's easy for people to copy and paste.
Re:I vote for HTML slides
ChrisDolan on 2008-07-02T02:11:08
I've been using S5 for a while now and I generally like the authoring workflow, especially with PPI::HTML to do code colorization. S5 is supposed to be resolution independent. However, I got bitten badly at YAPC::NA 2008 where I planned for 1024x768 but got 800x600, and lost the bottom and right of every slide. Luckily, I had generous margins so the talk was not a disaster. In retrospect, I should have just altered the text size with the browser's text zoom, but my brain skipped over that solution at the time.
My biggest advice to speakers, however, is to PRACTICE YOUR TALK. Maybe perform it for a smaller group first (like your local perl mongers group).
