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.
Early last year I wrote about how I don’t track you here, but others might. Third party sites whose content I re-use here by embedding them have the ability to track you to a certain extent. Earlier I already stopped using Slideshare and Scribd completely as a consequence, self-hosting my slide decks from now on.
For photos and videos the story is slightly different. Where it’s not essential that a video can be viewed inside my posting, I simply link to it with a screenshot, thus avoiding that YouTube or Vimeo tracks you on my page. In other cases I still embed the video.
For images I have been using Flickr since 2005. Back then uploading images to my hosting account quickly depleted the available storage space, and Flickr always was a good way to avoid that. I have and am a paying customer of Flickr, even through the years it was also available for free. Flickr is my online third place storage of images (now over 26k), as well as the place where I share those images for others to freely re-use (under Creative Commons licenses).
Embedding my Flickr photos here provides them with the opportunity to track views to the embedded images. The 2005 scarcity in storage space on my web host package is no longer a concern, whereas reducing readers’ exposure to tracking in whatever shape has become more important.
So from the start of the summer vacation I have stopped using Flickr embeds, and all images are and will be hosted on my webserver. The images do link to their counterparts on Flickr. In the case of my own images to point to re-usable versions of the photo, and the rest of my images. In the case of other people’s images I re-use to point to the source and its author. As before I will keep using Flickr to store and share photos.
Over the almost two decades of blogging I’ve embedded hundreds of images from Flickr, and I haven’t replaced those yet. Over time I will. It will become part of my daily routine of checking old postings made on the same day as today.
It makes ‘I don’t track you (but others here might)’ tilt some more towards ‘I don’t track you’ period.
This is the frontpage of my emerging wiki-like collection of semi-permanent content. Where blogposts form a ‘river’ of items, for reference it is useful to have a range of more static ‘pools’ of content. Both to provide additional context and background to blogposts, as well as a useful documentation in itself. Documentation of ongoing work, reading, research, or experiments. (April 2018).
Topics
Networked Agency
Ethics by Design
Indieweb
Information strategies and PKM
Site tweaks
Linqurator bookmarking tool
Bringing Slides home / self-hosting my presentation slides
Federated bookshelves
I use ConvertAPI to on the fly convert PDFs of my presentations into individual images (something Keynote can do for you locally on your Mac, btw), to create embeddable versions of my slidedeck. This is how I create my own Slideshare service as it were. I started doing that in the fall of 2020, and the last time I converted a slidedeck was in the fall of last year.
Today in preparation for a talk I gave this afternoon I went through the same routine, but nothing happened. No conversion of slides, no embeddable files. There were no error messages either, it just stayed stuck in the conversion step. I assumed it might be an API issue and logged into ConvertAPI to check.
Or tried to login, as it said my mail address or password were wrong. I clicked reset password, but did not receive an e-mail from ConvertAPI for it. Turned out my entire account had been deleted without me being aware of it.
I recreated my account (using the same email address as before thus proving my account no longer existed), copied the new API key to my WordPress config and was all set again.
Running the same routine as before now almost immediately gave the expected result. I did have to remove the uploaded PDFs from earlier attempts in WordPress though, as trashing those items in WP does not delete the uploaded PDF file.
I don’t know why my account was deleted or why I would not have received a message announcing deletion. Perhaps it’s an automated cleanup of dormant non-paying accounts like mine. ConvertAPI is a useful service, and they generously provide 1500 free seconds (my slide decks take about 2 to 4 seconds, so that would cover 375 to 750 slidedecks)