At 02:27 PM 12/14/00 +0100, Stas Bekman wrote:
>On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
>
> > > creating a set of tutorials for mongers and user groups? What's important
> > > is the information, not how fancy the background picture is.
> >
> > Thats where I think you're wrong. People care a *lot* about how things
> > look. Case in point with AxKit - I had an old site up at
> > xml.sergeant.org/axkit (I think its still there, I don't check). I didn't
> > get much interest, maybe 20 page views a day or so. When (again with
> > Robin's excellent designer help) I bit the bullet and redesigned at
> > axkit.org the number of hits rose dramatically the very day I released the
> > new design. And it wasn't just because of the domain name because AxKit
> > wasn't a well known name at the time. It was because it looked good (or at
> > least better - I'm still not happy with all that purple :-)
> >
> > The point being - we all despise marketing tactics of producing flashy web
> > sites with pretty pictures because we're geeks. But it works - it draws
> > people in. And provided you actually give them some good content to read
> > once you've drawn them in I don't see too many negative points about it.
>
>remember I was talking about slides, not sites.
Well, the nicer the slides the more they can be used outside of PM groups.
The ideal would be something that (A) Can be made to look nice and (B) Is
relatively brandable in case a conference has a particular look-and-feel
they prefer authors using.
Although I have to say I hate that practice. One year I gave a talk at
Sybase98 -- they were doing this silly World Cup theme a couple years back
and they forced all the slides throughout the conference to have a really
annoyingly conspicuous soccerball on a purple background. I'm serious, the
ball was massive. I digress.
However, I am willing to concede that as a first cut, fancy slides are
probably not worth it because the slides will change too often. Once v1 is
released, then someone can transcribe the slides to PPT (or maybe a tool
will exist by then) as a "stable release" if they want to (probably someone
like me.)
> > (and if I'm honest, I've always shuddered a bit seeing you use gv for
> > your slideshows - its just not a good slideshow application. Sorry
> > Stas :-)
>
>Well, that's what I have. I don't think that when you show bullets of text
>it matters if you use PP or gv. I'm not giving marketing presentation, but
>pure info comprised of text bullets and code snippets, gv does it just
>right. I could include pictures if I had any...
I think the slides are very good for your talks because they fit a style
you are comfortable with. But there are people who aren't so comfortable
with the plain look when giving a talk -- I am one of those people. I am
not talking about ruining a slideshow with annoying animations, just making
it look somewhat crisp with clean and mean graphics.
It's a preference, but as noted above, I am willing to concede that the
slides probably shouldn't be PPT at first cut because of the CVS issue as
well as making it easier to have as many people make changes as possible.
>On the technical presentations the speaker is what's important (and on
>other presentation types as well). One can read slides/handouts at home
>without coming to the conference at all.
Yes that's true. And you are a great speaker. I think no one would doubt
your enthusiasm about mod_perl when you talk. :)
But that doesn't mean that this style of slides will work for all people.
>Having nice slides requires a hell amount of time, which I unfortunately
>don't have. So please bear with me.
Sorry I didn't mean to bring it up as a sore point. Just wanted to point
out that this is an advantage of a PPT format vs generated slides. Just as
the advantage of generated slides is that, well, the slides actually exist
sooner!
Besides I believe even Tom Christiansen does the same thing (plain
generated slides), so you certainly aren't alone in prefering to use
generated slides as a speaker.
And I do believe that if we start off with PPT format, the lack of coherent
CVS support might make the project much slower than it should be.
>BTW, if you want to give the base level intro to mod_perl with nicer cool
>flashy slides, I won't stand on your way. It's just that nobody wants to
>do that. I won't mind talking about more advanced things for a change.
Yeah there's the rub... It's time consuming to produce such things just as
its time consuming to produce nice web sites.
Anyway, onto a tech question. Is there a recognized format for the
Pod2HTML2PS converter where I could take a vector image and then make the
PS import that vector image? That's one issue I have with gif and jpeg is
that they don't resize well, which is also a potential issue for slideshows.
