Publish Slidify Decks as Gists

Slidify now allows you to publish your slide decks as gists. You will need the dev version of slidify to use this feature.

require(devtools)
install_github(c('slidify', 'slidifyLibraries'), 'ramnathv', ref = 'dev')

Let us first create a directory for our slide deck and open an index.Rmd file to author our presentation.

dir.create('mydeck')
setwd('mydeck')
file.edit('index.Rmd')

Shown below is a sample index.Rmd file. Note that you need to set mode: standalone in the YAML front matter (or page properties), in order to be able to publish your deck as a gist. The standalone mode ensures that all library assets are served from an online CDN, thereby requiring you to only upload the html file.

---
title       : Testing Blocks
author      : Ramnath
mode        : standalone
---

## Read-And-Delete

1. Edit YAML front matter
2. Write using R Markdown
3. Use an empty line followed by three dashes to separate slides!

[Source](index.Rmd)

--- .class #id 

## Slide 2

Another Slide

> - Point 1
> - Point 2
> - Point 3

We can now slidify this deck and publish it as a gist. You will need to have the httr and rjson packages installed to be able to use this feature. In addition, you will also need a github account.

slidify('index.Rmd')
publish("My First Presentation", host = 'gist')

On publishing your slide deck, Slidify will return a url that will look like this

http://bl.ocks.org/{{username}}/raw/{{gistid}}

We use the excellent bl.ocks.org gist viewer built by Mike Bostock, the creator of d3.js to view the slide deck. Here is an example of a deck published as a gist.

By default, publishing as a gist only uploads files with the pattern index.*. You can override it by passing an explicit list of filenames to publish.

publish('My Second Presentation', filenames = c('myslides.Rmd', 'myslides.html'), host = 'gist')

This feature is still experimental, and I will appreciate any feedback/comments you might have, as you play with it.