Early november I am presenting both at the Dutch JFall and Devoxx BE conferences. This year I wanted to get started early, so I sat down and … “Ok, what am I going to use to create the presentation in? Keynote? Mmm … If I want to present this at different conferences with a matching style, maybe I need something different.”

So, I looked at some Markdown slide tools. RemarkJS looked nice. I played a bit with it and after one night I had the Devoxx look in a template for RemarkJS.

Jekyll also looked nice to be able to split the Markdown and HTML into separate files. This will also make it easier maybe to switch presentation layouts, I thought.
Jekyll is also not that difficult and it was setup quickly for my sample presentation.
A disadvantage of using Jekyll and RemarkJS together, is that they both use double brackets for variables. Since Jekyll already tries to replace those, variables cannot be used for RemarkJS in this setup.

Finally I wanted to be able to write the markdown and interactively see the resulting slides in a browser. I found this blogpost which explained a Gulp+BrowserSync setup.

So … now I have a generic setup in which I can write in markdown and see the result directly in the browser. The look can easily be customised with css and the style can easily be switched using page variables.

I made the setup available in this git repo so it is freely available for anyone: https://bitbucket.org/diversit/presentation-template-for-markdown/

Now I can start on the real slides … ;-)