In my recent post about bringing slides home to my own server and domain, I mentioned Speakerstack.net. On their site they mention completely hosting everything yourself, but the site afaik never points to anything explaining that. It does provide as I described the means to upload your presentations there.

During the weekend I reached out to Cliff, the developer behind Speakerstack. He gave me the link to the WordPress plugin (in beta) he created, which allows you to do everything yourself in a WP instance.

I took a look at the code and what it does, while providing an admin console to do so from within WP, is:

1. Take a PDF and send it to ConvertAPI (provided by the Lithuanian company Baltsoft), to convert the PDF into jpg images, one per slide
2. Take those jpg images and put them in a slider, using Kevin Wheeler’s Slick Slider

You need a ConvertAPI key to approach it, which is easy to arrange.

I will probably test drive this plugin in a separate WP instance, and if I’m ok with it I will use that as my personal ‘Slideshare’ place. I may also consider going with just the conversion and the slider bits, as uploading my presentation PDFs through WordPress and managing everything there seems a bit overdoing it, if I also have direct access to the back-end of the hosting package and could upload everything in bulk. Then again, bulk is only a consideration at the start, having my Slideshare history to migrate.

I added a WP instance on a domain I have (tonz.nl) and installed the plugin, created an API key for the PDF conversion. It takes a number of minutes for the conversion to happen, and it works.

If you check the embedded presentation above, you’ll see that the download link and the full screen link are pointing to my tonz.nl domain. The download link is in the WP uploads folder, which is logical, but I probably want to change. Likely I will put a Yourls instance in front of it to have shortened urls that cloack the folder the files are actually in, and which lets me count the number of downloads as well.