Naked Librarians

Thanks to Dorothea for pointing out that it’s CSS Naked Day. Simply put, you toss up your website without a stylesheet. Then you see if you can still read it and use it. Then you think about web standards and intentional usability and good web design. It’s time to show off your <body>, for a good cause. If you don’t normally look at this website through anything other than an RSS reader come check it out.

presentations without powerpoint, how I do it

I give many of my talks using a very basic HTML template that creates the illusion of slides. It has a few advantages

  • it’s free
  • it works on any browser and any OS
  • my talks take up very little space, file-size-wise
  • I’m not using someone else’s proprietary software or the same old clip art you’ve seen a million times before
  • talks are available in the same format online and off
  • easy print option with extra space for hidden notes [new!]

There are a few downsides as well

  • it’s not totally standards compliant. If you need total compliance, use S5, it’s great.
  • you do need to know a little HTML to make it work for you
  • Since you’re not using PowerPoint, you may tend towards wordiness.

People have been asking about it, so I’ve decided to make a blank presentation with all the stylesheets and whatnot, available for downloading. It’s just a basic HTML page, two stylesheets, a sample image or two, and a styleswitcher. Try it out, tweak it, let me know what you think.

hi – 10mar

Hi. I’ve added a techinfo page that details all the little modifications I’ve done to a standard WordPress install to arrive at the site looking like this. Please note there’s a style-switcher for those of you who read the site via its web page. If you find this style too hard to read, or too ugly, you can go to the Look&Feel section and pick a more standard layout. This will set a cookie on your machine so you’ll never have to think about this layout again unless you view it with a different browser. It took all of two minutes to work this out, WordPress has been a delight to use so far.