#slidify

Recently, I did a presentation for my lab group at school, and I wanted to do an "experiment" and try to do everything without PowerPoint.

Crazy you say? Well, I considered some options, and I went ahead and made my presentation using Slidify!!

I was super impressed with Slidify because it was very easy to get started and it uses R Markdown syntax which I have already used for some blog posts. To get started, you just use a textfile and separate the slides using a newline with three dashes "---". After just a few minutes, you can easily start generating HTML output slideshows that work great.

It helps if you have some web design experience to use Slidify also, because you can style Markdown code using CSS. Here is a discussion about how to align images in a markdown document, and I particularly like the second answer. Unfortunately. I had some trouble aligning images too, so I think I could probably do with some practice (see Figure 1)

Figure 1. Example slide from my presentation with a figure that is cutoff. I used the CSS style "float:right" but for some reason it didn't stay on the page.

I also wanted to publish my slides on the web, and found that you can use Slidify to publish to your Github repository using Github Pages. Again, this process was also surprisingly simple: you simply make a branch on your repository that is named "gh-pages" and push all your Slidify slides to it!

The outcome: Comparison and analysis of ChIP-seq experiments

An interview with Brad Efron about scientific writing. I haven't watched the whole interview, but I do know that Efron is one of my favorite writers among statisticians.

Slidify, another approach for making HTML5 slides directly from R.  I love the idea of making HTML slides, I would definitely do this regularly. But there are a couple of issues I feel still aren't resolved: (1) It is still just a little too hard to change the theme/feel of the slides in my opinion. It is just CSS, but that's still just enough of a hurdle that it is keeping me away and (2) I feel that the placement/insertion of images is still a little clunky, Google Docs has figured this out, I'd love it if they integrated the best features of Slidify, Latex, etc. into that system. 

Statistics is still the new hotness. Here is a Business Insider list about 5 statistics problems that will "change the way you think about the world". 

I love this one in the New Yorker, especially the line,"statisticians are the new sexy vampires, only even more pasty" (via Brooke A.)

We've hit the big time! We have been linked to by a real (Forbes) blogger.