I’m doing a new session for the workshop series next week — Social Software in Libraries. For this one, instead of using Impress and PowerPoint (the OpenOffice and MS Office slideshow apps) I’m using Jessamyn West’s HTML & CSS system. So far it’s been easy to get going, except for the part where I keep mistyping the filenames for photos and forgetting to upload them. This presentation is still in the very early stages of development, but you can see what I’ve got so far if you’re so inclined.

What I really like about this is that I can use an image for the background and automatically give the whole presentation some visual interest, thereby being able to cut out finding random clip art and endlessly performing Creative Commons searches on Flickr. I also like that it’s platform independent, and that this can just live on my website as-is — no need to make PDFs or anything like that.

I know HTML and CSS, so for me this was a snap to set up and customize (which I didn’t even do much of, in this case). But the barrier is low — anyone with a modicum of knowledge of HTML could use this; probably the  most daunting part would be changing the background color from the default that Jessamyn coded, and even that should be pretty easy for someone who is willing to take a few minutes to look at things and figure out how they work (or ask their favorite geek for help).