Presentations

I'm teaching a class this semester (Protocols and Network Management), and it seems like a class about networking should use the network, at least a little bit. So I teach from online class notes. Although it takes a long time to prepare for each class, I've got a routine that makes turning my notes into a presentation relatively easy.

First I organize my notes in OmniOutliner, and save as OPML. Once the notes are ready, I'm almost done! OmniOutliner doesn't handle URLs well, so I mangle text like http:// by running the clipboard through a sed filter. I store the Terminal commands to do this in iSnip, of course.

Next I launch TestXSLT. For the XML, I drag-and-drop the OPML file; for the XSL, I use either my own version of opml2s5.xsl (from decafbad with my change to use relative paths) for each class, or beigeopml2web.xsl from Buzz for the syllabus. (I never got Buzz working on my Mac, but you can download it just for the well-done XSL files.) Then I click on Process and save the HTML output. XML transformations are so powerful!

Then I have an S5 presentation. I un-mangle poorly-auto-recogonized text with the reverse sed filter also in iSnip. Then I have a file that I upload before I dash off to teach class! It's a snap!

Of course, it's not always that easy. My guest speaker taught from an OpenOffice.org (Impress) presentation. Icky as it sounds, save as PowerPoint. Then register for a free account so you can use the cool PowerPoint to OPML conversion tool at Intelligent Teams / OPML Workstation. After the conversion, you can look at the browser version at http://opmlworkstation.com/browse/name you picked/ or the raw OPML at http://opmlworkstation.com/wiki/name you picked/. Cinch!

But I can go from outline notes to S5 HTML in a very short time, so easily! Ah!