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---
title: Using Showoff for Markdown Presentations
description: >
Use Showoff to make slideshows and presentations in Markdown with awesome
audience interactivity.
---
Recently, I had to give a presentation and decided to do some research on using
Markdown. By coincidence, I had also been looking into
[Puppet](https://puppetlabs.com), a flexible and powerful configuration manager,
when I stumbled across [Showoff](https://github.com/puppetlabs/showoff), another
Puppet Labs project.
<!--more-->
Showoff is a Ruby application that takes a Markdown file with some [special
formatting](https://github.com/puppetlabs/showoff/blob/master/documentation/AUTHORING.rdoc)
and transforms it into a web-accessible slideshow. As expected, you can open up
a presenter view in your browser. You can also easily open up a second window to
use on your projector in full screen. You can even give your audience the
address for the server so they can follow along on their own screens.
There are also some nice audience interactivity features, like the ability to
ask questions through the web interface. These questions will be shown on the
presenter's screen. Audience members also have the ability to indicate whether
the presenter is moving too quickly or too slowly so that an adjustment can be
made accordingly.
Finally, Showoff is designed with software presentations in mind, with the
ability to dynamically run Ruby, JavaScript, or Coffeescript code included in
your slides. You can attach other files or labs to your slides, so audience
members following along on their own devices can easily access reference
materials at the appropriate time.
For a small presentation like the one I was doing, a lot of the more advanced
features of Showoff would have been overkill, but it still made an awesome
presentation method. It was also really neat to be able to say that the slides
were available on Github if anyone wanted to look at them afterwards.
|
