This last weekend I had the privilege to present some recent work at the 17th annual Southwest Quantum Information and Technology (SQuInT) workshop in Berkeley, CA. The focus of the work is to evaluate some claims about the importance of using weak measurements for the purposes of tomography. I made the slides in HTML and recorded myself giving the presentation so that I could post the talk directly on my website, and the result is fairly satisfactory.

For this presentation I used deck.js. I’ve made HTML slideshows using S5 and reveal.js before and think there are a lot of reasons to create slideshows in a cross-platform, web-friendly format. I chose deck.js for this presentation because I had recently been made aware of the deck.browsercast.js plugin, which will play back an audio recording of you giving the presentation while changing the slides at the appropriate time (like a screencast, only better). Turns out Browsercast will also work for reveal.js, but I didn’t realize this at the start.

Long story short, I created deck.js slides for my presentation, recorded myself presenting, made a file recording when the slide transitions were supposed to happen, and included the deck.browsercast.js extension files to get my browsercast ready for publishing. You can watch the finished result here!

There are still a few hiccups. For some reason, the play button doesn’t work to pause the presentation. You can still play/pause using the spacebar, but I haven’t had time to figure out exactly why the button can’t be pressed. I also used MathML for the equations in my slides. This let me set parts of my equations to arbitrary colors, but it also means that it requires a browser with good MathML support (Firefox does beautifully, but Chrome not so much, even thought MathML is part of the HTML5 recommendation). MathJax works better in a cross-browser way, but it is much more limited in the colors I can apply to individual elements in my equations. The final sacrifice I had to make in the browsercast is changing all my graphics from SVGs to PNGs. This is a limitation of hosting my website on the UNM servers. SVGs show up fine for me when I locally build my site, but then won’t appear when I deploy.

I’ll be giving an abbreviated version of this talk at the APS March Meeting, so maybe I’ll be able to smooth a few things out with this process before then.