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Presenter mode

Slide-deck-style facilitator notes embedded in your workshop pages.

2 min

Workshops are often delivered live. Presenter mode lets you embed timing cues, “kick off the demo container in the background”, and other facilitator notes directly in your markdown — visible only when you toggle them on.

How to use it

Wrap presenter-only content in a presenter shortcode:

markdown 
{{< presenter >}}
Start the EC2 instance — boot takes ~3 minutes.
{{< /presenter >}}

{{< presenter title="Timing" >}}
Allow 10 minutes for attendees to finish this section.
{{< /presenter >}}

By default the block is hidden and presenter controls are locked. A floating “Presenter” pill appears only after the browser has visited a URL with ?presenter=1 at least once.

Three ways to toggle

  1. Append ?presenter=1 to the URL once — unlocks presenter controls in this browser and turns presenter mode on
  2. Click the pill — after unlock, use the floating “Presenter” button in the bottom-right on pages with presenter notes
  3. Press P twice in quick succession — after unlock, same effect with no mouse

The unlock and mode state persist in localStorage, so once unlocked you keep presenter controls as you navigate and revisit pages in that browser profile.

Live example

If presenter mode is off, you should see no block above this paragraph. If presenter mode is on, you should see a styled note.

Don’t put answers here

The markup is in the page source. Anyone who view-source can see the content of every presenter block. Use it for delivery cues, not hidden answers.

For genuinely-hidden answers (like exercise solutions), use the solution shortcode inside an exercise — that’s a <details> element, also revealable, but framed as “click to reveal” rather than “hidden facilitator content”.

Disabling

If you don’t use presenter notes, no setup is needed — the JS code does nothing on pages without any presenter shortcode blocks. The toggle pill only appears when there’s something to toggle.

To disable globally (e.g. if your team wants to ensure speaker notes never make it into rendered output), comment out every presenter block before deploy or override layouts/shortcodes/presenter.html with an empty file in your site.

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