Web 2.0 - My Slide Show

I decided that I should make a quick slide show as I wanted to see how simple it is to create a project. Good news - it is as simple as cut/copy/paste/save and then upload. You don't believe me? Here are some quick steps to make a slide show. I opt'd to use a service called www.slideshow.com to host my slides. This is a free site with options to upgrade if needed. The default has something around 1 GB of hosting which isn't bad considering it is free.

The steps to use this site to share pictures are as follows. Decide how you want to upload your slideshow - PDF, PPT or some other options. PPT is very user friendly, so I used this. Ok - now for the recipe

1. Take your pictures and place each picture(s) on a slide. Add as many slides as needed as long as you stay under the 30 MB file size limitation. Pictures can be added in terms of cut/copy/paste or inserted.
2. Go to www.slideshow.com and log into your free account.
3. Now select the option to upload your presentation - wait a fairly long time for the presentation to upload [It's free - what do you expect...]
4. Click on 'my slide show' and there you have it.

Here is an example of a slide show - click here.

There is one gotcha that I thought I would point out. Notice in my example the 2nd slide is just a pure gray slide? Well, this is because I didn't have the slide centered in the ppt and only a portion of the slide was taken. The entire picture must be centered. I was hoping that the application would center the picture as this seemed reasonable, but that isn't the case.

What would make www.slideshow.com even better (besides being faster and centering pictures?), well, a bit of user protection for content would be nice. Once pictures are uploaded, anyone on the Internet can look at them. This isn't a huge problem, but if you are taking pictures of your family/kids, you might not want this content available to the general public. It would be nice if they created access control lists or some other structure that controlled access.

Go luck and enjoy!