How to Create a Flash Slideshow for Your WordPress Blog

I love Wordpress.com hosted blogs. They're free, easy to use, and in my opinion much more aesthetically pleasing than Blogger.com blogs.

But, they also come with extra security restrictions. One of those is that it's tough to embed remotely hosted flash movies onto your page. You also can't upload your own flash videos unless you upgrade your site.

This posed a bit of a problem for me. I wanted to host some flash slideshows of pictures on a Wordpress.com blog, but I couldn't simply embed a slideshow from a normal service like Picasa (Note: There are ways to do this, but I found them to be annoying). I searched high and low, and eventually found a service that lets me do just what I wanted.

Enter "SlideShare"

SlideShare is a free service that lets you share presentations on the Internet. You can sign up for a free account and host an unlimited number of presentations, as long as each one is less than 100mb in size.

The service seems to be intended for sharing information slide-shows, like Power Point presentations. However, if you know what you're doing, you can easily use SlideShare to create a photo slideshow. The great thing is that SlideShare has partnered with Wordpress. You can use regular Wordpress shortcode to embed a Slideshare presentation onto your Wordpress.com site.

Here's a sample slideshow that I put together, using pictures from my backyard.

How Do I Make the Slideshow?

SlideShare doesn't let you just upload images and drop them into a slideshow. Like I said, it's intended for sharing informational presentations. It only lets you upload certain filetypes - like Power Point slideshows (.ppt), OpenOffice Impress Slideshows (.odp), or Adobe PDF files (.pdf).

One solution would be to use Power Point or Open Office Impress to create a typical presentation. On each slide, drop in a single picture. Add some text, if you want, for a caption. This would give you a file in one of the required formats - .ppt or .odp.

I chose another method. I used Adobe InDesign to design a pdf document. This gave me a lot more control over the layout and design of the slideshow. I created the document with the proportions I wanted (1024 x 768, a standard monitor size) and laid out one picture on each page. I added a decorative border and some decorative text for captions. When the layout was done, I exported the project as a high-quality print pdf, and it was ready for SlideShare.

Whatever method you choose, upload the file to your SlideShare account and then wait a few minutes until it is processed and converted into a flash slideshow.

How Do I Embed the Slideshow on my Wordpress.com Blog?

After you've uploaded the slideshow and it's been converted, view the slideshow in your Slideshare account. To the right of the slideshow, you should see a text box labeled "Embed."

This contains the normal HTML code that you would place on a website to embed the slideshow. However, due to the security built into Wordpress, you can't use this code. Wordpress will edit out the important part of the HTML, and you'll be left with nothing on the page.

However, if you click on the link that says "Custom" next to the text box, you'll see two more options. The bottom option, aptly labeled "For Wordpress.com" is what you want. Copy and paste that bit of shortcode into your Wordpress.com post and the slideshow will appear.

You're all set! Go start making some slideshows... your blog readers are waiting.