I find I enjoy the process of self hosting my old presentations much more than I had expected. I expected the transition being a chore, but it turns out it is not.
Last September I quit using Slideshare and created a way to host my own slidedecks myself. I had 132 presentations in my personal slideshare account, and a similiar number in my company’s account. Migrating them into my own set-up seemed like a daunting chore. I resolved to take my time for it, to spread out the work load.
I first created a list of presentations that I embedded in this website at the time, containing 55 slide decks. In that list I marked those that I currently think are still relevant, or that I regard as important to me at the time, or that in hindsight turned out to contain something that gained more significance in my work afterwards. Then I started to manually add those prioritised slide decks to my self hosted collection (tonz.nl for Dutch slides, tonz.eu for non-Dutch slides), at most one per day.
Unexpectedly this is fun to do. Because I do not just upload slides, but add links to my blogposts about the talk at the time, a video etc, I sort-of revisit the conference in question. Sometimes rewatching my own talk, sometimes going through the slides of other presenters at the same event or watching their videos. It resurfaces old ideas I forgot about but still find useful, and it results in new associations and thoughts about the topics I discussed in those talks. Leading to new notes and ideas now. It also shows me there is a consistency in my work that isn’t always obvious to me, and it surfaces the evolutionary path of some of my ideas and activities. That makes it worthwile to bring these slides home. Like reassembling an old photo album whose pictures slipped out because the glue became too old.
Schools were closed again this week so both E’s and my work time was limited. The days I succeeded in gettng of to a good start were the ones where I got down to do something tangible right away because I prepared it the evening before. This week I
Did administrative things like meeting payroll, making the liquidity planning for the coming months and send some invoices
Created an overview of open data impact measurement frameworks that I’ve worked on over the years, for a client
Discussed and detailed the revised definition of done of a project
Created a second design version, and first full version of a story collection point for a citizen science project in Rotterdam
Created a first draft of an overview of all current national and European data related developments with timelines for legal, organisational and thematic timelines. This as a way to be able to anticipate actions for the Dutch Tactical Council on EU data I’m supporting this year.
Had the weekly client meetings
Enjoyed migrating slide decks into my self-hosted slide sharing set-up
Moved a decade worth of notes out of Evernote
Had a session with our personal finance advisor on pension planning
Y developed a fever towards the end of the week, and I took her for a Covid test. She was a bit scared but carried herself bravely, and it was quickly done. It took 48hrs for the results to arrive, so during that time we quarantined our household as per the measures in place. The results came back negative, and Y was relieved she could go out and play in the park again. I’m relieved too, also that she can go to school tomorrow.
This week in….1861
This week in 1861 saw the birth of Santiago Rusiñol, a Spanish Catalan artist. While famous for his later colorful landscapes and gardens, earlier he lived in Paris, capturing city life.
Interior of Café des Incohérents 16 bis rue Fontaine, Montmartre, Paris, by Santiago Rusiñol, 1889/90, public domain image
Avenue of plane trees, by Santiago Rusiñol, 1916, public domain image
I started self-hosting my presentation slides in september 2020. The immediate trigger was the sale by LinkedIn of Slideshare to Scribd, and the resulting changes in access and tracking.
I set up two separate WordPress sites to host my slide decks.
tonz.nl which hosts my Dutch language slides
tonz.eu which hosts my English and German language slides.
With my hosting provider I checked if it was ok to host a site whose only purpose is to provide downloads, as nominally it would be against their ToS to provide a download website. My purpose, sharing my own slides was no problem, as the expected traffic is light anyway.
The short domain names, and my ability to create URLs on those domains as I want, allow me to create short easily sharable URLs for my presentations. I announce the URL on my slides during delivery, enabling participants in the audience to immediately access and reshare my presentation file and/or notes, and embed the slide in their own sites.
I use the Speakerstack WP plugin to manage my slides. The workflow is uploading the PDF to my WP media library. The plugin then uses ConvertAPI to convert my slides PDF to a series of images and adds them in an embeddable slider. That slider can be seen full screen.
Next to that I create a page, with the short URL mentioned, in which I embed the slides, add a transcript, links to blog posts and PDF download.
I am now in the process of uploading presentations to the two sites, creating the pages and replacing the original Slideshare embeds with the new self-hosted embeds. It is a pleasing experience to bring slides home.