Earlier today, I thought I was going to try and attempt some kind of Neuromancer like-feat with SlideShare after the service decided that the latest presentation I had painstakingly crafted for Radix decided not to have any working links. The presentation was meant to be made live by lunchtime and none of our source links or links back to the business were working after uploading it (I made it private to start with). Not exactly helpful for helping to keep us looking honest and to aid us in driving the various kinds of business goals that come with content marketing.

Of course searching around for an answer got me nothing, the two issues with links and SlideShare being issues I had taken measures to avoid. I was well aware of the fact that hyperlinks won’t work on the first three slides of a SlideShare and that was the main thing that got back to me when I searched around the issue. Then there were the results that said that links that fall within the the left and right extremities of the SlideShare were also not going to work – another issue I was already aware of. Having checked over the source PDF, I found that all of the links were functioning fine with it, the source document was fully operational.

So what had gone wrong? And why couldn’t the clock stop counting down? (Well of course time wasn’t going to stop for just the entire world around me).

In the end, I realised that somehow SlideShare had ballsed up at some point during the conversion process. And the solution to that was pretty simple – re-upload the SlideShare, check that the links were working and make the presentation public. It was the equivalent of turning it off and then on again.

And it worked. Here’s the finished presentation:

When stuff doesn’t work at critical times