Not often do I get to talk about the cool stuff I do at work in concrete, non-NDA terms. But today is different, and I’m excited.
Back in 2011, I was talking at WordCamp Portland with a few people about how we could use WordPress to replace our presentations. PowerPoint and Keynote were great, but bulky and non-portable. Tools like Shower and Impress are beautiful, but unapproachable for non-developers. We wanted a way to build our WordPress presentations in WordPress and distribute them the same way.
Fast forward to 2013, and I’m given the opportunity to work with a fantastic team to develop seoslides – a first-of-its-kind presentation builder completely housed within WordPress.
I’ve been using development versions of seoslides since WordCamp Seattle last June. It’s based on many of the tools I was already using to build HTML presentations, but with no need to hand-edit the markup to build a presentation. Instead, seoslides has an awesome what-you-see-is-what-you-get drag-and-drop canvas editor. You can embed text, images, and even YouTube and Vimeo videos.
And this is just the beginning!
The team at Alorum has also put together two awesome SaaS[ref]Software as a Service[/ref] systems to go along with the plugin. The first of which is an import-from-PDF service. Now, all of your legacy PowerPoint and Keynote presentations can be imported into seoslides as graphics. For proof, check out the embedded presentation below – from my WordCamp Portland lightning talk last month.
[seoslides embed_id=”f7fcb525da71″ script_src=”http://eamann.com/embed-script/wcpdx-2013/5675/” overview_src=”http://eamann.com/slides/wcpdx-2013/” site_src=”http://eamann.com” site_title=”Eric A Mann” title=”WordCamp Portland 2013″ /]
The second hosted service is where the added bonus lies. It’s a presentation sharing community, called seoslid.es. Using seoslides, you can push your presentations to this external site and embed them there. This means your content, displayed on another domain. Because of the way seoslides is engineered, every view of seoslid.es is traffic for your site.
seoslides was just launched, so I’ve had my presentations syndicated on seoslid.es for only a week. And my site traffic has already seen an impact!
In all honesty, I’m very biased towards this plugin. I’ve spent more time with it than just about any other piece of code I’ve ever worked on; but I’m also incredibly happy with the result and with the efforts of the entire team involved! I have no doubt you will be as well.
So, if you already use WordPress, install seoslides today and give it a try. You won’t be disappointed!
