Publishing Slides

Publishing Slides

The slides created by reveal-ck are static html.

Thankfully, static html is easily published and shared via Github Pages.

What follows is an introduction and general approach for publishing slides. If you'd prefer to see a working example, then you can jump to jedcn/publishing-reveal-ck-slides.

reveal-ck and slides/

reveal-ck generates slides in the slides/ directory.

If you've added to images/ or css/ to support your presentation, these files are also copied into slides/images or slides/css.

The simple idea of "putting everything in slides/" means that slides/ contains everything you need, and in turn this allows you to:

• zip up the contents of slides/ and SFTP it to the server of your choice.
• rsync the contents underneath slides/ to the web server of your choice.
• commit the content in slides/ and then publish and share it via Github Pages.

If you're zipping or rsyncing, I presume you'll handle the details.

However-- if you're using Github Pages we can all follow a common approach.

reveal-ck and Github Pages

And so, here's how I suggest you go forward:

• Track your main content (the slides.md, images, css) on the master branch.
• Add slides/ to your .gitignore over on master.
• Create a gh-pages branch that's an "orphan" from your master branch
• Clone gh-pages into your slides/ directory
• Generate slides as normal

If you do this, you'll commit changes to master and you'll commit the generated slides to gh-pages.

When you push gh-pages up to origin, your slides will automatically be published.

Step 0: Create some Slides

• Use reveal-ck as you normally would to create slides.
• Start tracking these slides in git, but .gitignore the slides/ directory
• Commit everything but the generated slides, create a repo for your talk, and push what you've got up to https://github.com.
• Let's imagine that your slides landed here: https://github.com/jedcn/publishing-reveal-ck-slides

Step 1: Create a branch named gh-pages

Follow these directions provided by github for manually creating a gh-pages branch. Pro Tip: cd /tmp before you do the following.

I usually start these directions with cd /tmp, meaning, I create a temporary clone on my local machine in the tmp directory. This lets me be sure that I won't impact my original slide presentation.

Step 2: Clone the gh-pages branch to ./slides

Once you've created a gh-pages, then return to the original location where you cloned and built out your slides. Then..

• Add slides to your .gitignore
• Eliminate the generated ./slides directory with rm -rf ./slides
• Clone the newly created gh-pages directory into ./slides by cloning a single branch, like so: git clone https://github.com/jedcn/publishing-reveal-ck-slides.git --branch gh-pages --single-branch ./slides

Step 3: Regenerate Slides, Commit, Push, Repeat

Now you've got the same repository cloned twice-- one version exists in the present working directory and a second, gh-pages version, exists underneath ./slides.

To publish changes (and make future changes):

• Regenerate your slides with reveal-ck generate
• Change directory into ./slides
• Look at what's in index.html with your browser
• Commit any changes and then push this branch back up to gh-pages, ala, git push origin gh-pages:gh-pages
• View what's at https://jedcn.github.io/publishing-reveal-ck-slides, and circulate this to your friends.

You're done!