The latest tweets from @gitpitch. GitPitch is the Markdown presentation service on Git that lets developers create slide decks for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. GitPitch Surveys, powered by JotForm, will turn your slideshow into a two-way conversation that allows you to gather feedback from your audience.

I really don’t like Powerpoint.

I’ll do pretty much anything to avoid writing a presentation in it. Thankfully for the last few years there’s been a service called GitPitch which allowed me to write presentations in markdown, push to Github, and it publishes the presentation at a custom URL.

I really liked this service as it made updating my presentations really easy and if anyone asked for my slides I could give them the URL.

Unfortunately, GitPitch is shutting down on March 1st so all my presentations will become unavailable after that date.

So I had to find an alternative and as there’s no way I was going to use Powerpoint, I was kinda stuck.

Thankfully, Mark Wilkinson (b|t) came to my rescue and told me about Reveal.

(He also gave me some (ok, a LOT) of pointers in how to get up and running, thank you Mark!)

Reveal combined with Github Pages pretty much gives me the same setup that I had with GitPitch so I was saved from Powerpoint!

Let’s run through how to create a presentation using both.

First, clone down the Reveal repo: –

Create a directory for the new presentation locally: –

Navigate to the new directory: –

Initialise the repo: –

N.B. – you can confiure git to initialise a main branch instead of master by running: –We need to populate the repo with something before we can do anything else. So create a test file: –

Commit test.txt to main branch: –

Now go to Github and create the repository that we’re going to push the local one to: –

Once the repo is created, Github will give instructions on how to link and push our local repository to it: –

So run: –

And there’s the repo with our test file in it on Github: –

Now that the main branch has been initialised and the first commit executed we can create a gh-pages branch.

The gh-pages branch, when pushed to Github, will automatically create a URL that we can use to publish our presentation.

So let’s create the branch: –

Gitpitch Alternatives

Switch to the gh-pages branch: –

Copy the required files into the gh-pages branch from the Reveal repo: –

Open the index.html file and replace: –

With the following: –

What this is doing is allowing us to use a slides.md file to create our presentation (data-markdown=”slides.md”). Check out this page for what the other lines are doing.

Now create the slides.md file (just going to have a title slide initially): –

Now run a commit on the gh-pages branch: –

And finally, add the remote location for the branch and push: –

And that’s it! Give it a few minutes and the presentation will be available at dbafromthecold.github.io/demopresentation

The URL can be checked in the settings of the repo: –

And there’s the presentation! To add more slides, simply update the slides.md file. For an example, check out my Docker Deep Dive slides.

DISCLAIMER! – that doesn’t contain the greatest markdown if I’m honest, but it works for what I want

Finally…what happens if you’re at a conference and the wifi is sketchy? No bother, if you have Python installed you can navigate to where your presentation is locally and run: –

And the presentation will be available at localhost:8080

Gitpitch Shutting Down

Pretty cool eh?

Gitpitch

Thanks for reading!