I’ve given a handful of talks over the years and hosted every deck on slides.com. It’s a great editor, but I didn’t love that all of my talks lived on a service I didn’t control (not to mention I finally maxed out the free plan). So I moved them here, onto this site, where they sit in the same repo as everything else. It turned out to be pretty painless, mostly because slides.com decks are just reveal.js under the hood.
Here’s the whole process.
The one catch is that exporting a deck as HTML requires a paid plan. I subscribed to the Lite tier, then for each deck used Export → HTML.
Each export comes down as a self-contained ZIP that has everything the deck needs to run on its own:
index.html — the reveal.js deck itself, including my speaker notes and the speaker viewlib/ — the CSS, JS, and fonts that power the deckNo accounts, no network calls, no build step. Just static files.
This site is built with Jekyll, and since a reveal.js deck is just static HTML/CSS/JS, there wasn’t much to do. I unzipped each export into its own folder under slides/, copied verbatim:
slides/
saddle-up/
index.html
lib/
<images>/
complex-systems/
...
The important detail is that the deck’s index.html has no YAML front matter (metadata at the top of Jekyll files). This is important because Jekyll only processes files that start with front matter — everything else is copied through byte-for-byte. So Jekyll leaves the deck completely alone, and all of its relative asset paths (lib/…, the image folder) resolve exactly like they did in the ZIP.
From there it was just some glue:
slides/index.html landing page — a normal Jekyll page that lists and links every talk.That’s it. No plugins, no reveal.js dependency of my own to manage — each deck ships its own copy.
Copying files is easy; the interesting part was confirming each deck actually still worked.
Assets: I checked that every image and library reference in each deck’s index.html pointed at a file that was really there. slides.com names its image files with hashes and tucks them in a per-deck folder, so it was worth verifying rather than assuming.
Speaker notes: this one surprised me. My first grep for reveal.js notes came up empty, and I briefly thought the notes hadn’t survived the export. They had — slides.com stores them in a JSON blob inside the page and injects them into the slides at load time, which is why they aren’t visible as plain markup. The S key still pops open the speaker view with all my notes intact.
One real gotcha: one deck had showNotes: true in its config, which renders the speaker notes right on the slide for every visitor. Not what I want on a public site — notes should be for me, in the speaker view. Flipping it to false (matching all the other decks) fixed it while keeping the notes available behind the S key.
Nine talks are now self-hosted here, spanning 2016 through 2026 — no third-party service required. You can find them all at /slides/. Press S on any deck if you want to peek at the notes.