Last night I gave my first pukka pecha kucha talk at the monthly PHPNW. The talk is a lightning talk with 20 slides with 20 seconds a slide. I.e. 6 minutes 40 seconds in total. Since I hadn’t even decided I was going to talk until last Friday and I had no talk prepared I was still preparing the slides on the train to Manchester where the meetings are held.

I didn’t have a VGA adapter for my MacBook and had to borrow one to connect it to the project. I think I need to buy one. I bought a DVI adapter when I bought the machine but not the VGA one as I thought who needs them with modern monitors. But of course most projectors have VGA only connections so such adapters are a necessary component of the presenter’s toolkit.

The talk seemed to go well and was appreciated by the audience and plugins seemed to be my topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. There was some interest in my Wordpress Coppermine Widget plugin and techniques I had used in the Javascript for it. I think this will become the subject of another blog post.

I went a little awry with my mental arithmetic and ran over by about a minute. When Lornajane gave her talk she had the slides change automatically after 20 seconds so you know when the talking time for a slide is up. I will steal this idea!

My slides are available as a PDF download.

The widget that provides the thumbnails from my Coppermine gallery is now available officially from the Wordpress plug-ins pages at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cpg-widget/

There is a page on this blog for it here.