Last tended on 6 September, 2021 (first created 20 February, 2021)

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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.

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