---
title: Highly Strung | Codurance
description: Our team of dedicated software craftspeople provides consultancy, software development, and training services to clients seeking high quality development processes and software solutions.
---

[Publications | Codurance ](https://www.codurance.com/publications)

# [Highly Strung | Codurance](https://www.codurance.com/publications/2014/10/02/highly-strung)

 Written by [Samir Talwar](https://www.codurance.com/publications/author/samir-talwar) | 01 Oct 2014

This blog post is way overdue.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a talk entitled Highly Strung for the [Virtual Java User Group (vJUG)](http://virtualjug.com/) on when and how to use strings in your code.

Spoiler: don't.

So this blog post is really just to ask you to check it out if you're interested. The link's up top, and has the talk in essay form, the slides *and* the video, lovingly recorded by the folks who run the vJUG.

Go on, check it out. I want to tell you something else, but afterwards.

OK, now the cool bit. Go back to that page and click on the "Presentation" link in the top-right corner, and watch as the page *doesn't* reload.

OK, funky JavaScript. Who cares?

Well, that's because the essay and the slides are the same HTML document (give or take). It's just markup and a little bit of JavaScript to get the ball rolling.

If you look at the HTML source of the document, you'll see that there are lots of `<section>` blocks. Each one is a slide in the presentation. Inside those are lots of `<div>` blocks with a class of `notes`. In presentation mode, these are hidden. And it's [all Markdown](https://github.com/SamirTalwar/talks/blob/gh-pages/index.md) under the hood, rendered by GitHub Pages, so it's just a static site.

And, well, that's about it. All that "Presentation" link does is change the CSS class on the `<body>` to tell the document to hide the notes (and show a few extra things), and load up [reveal.js](https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js). Shiny, huh?

The only thing I'm missing is a way to get back to the essay form. Currently I reload the page, because there seems to be no way to unload reveal.js once it's loaded, but that's not so bad, y'know.

[This post was cross-posted to my personal blog.](http://monospacedmonologues.com/post/98472746240/highly-strung)

[View full post](https://www.codurance.com/publications/2014/10/02/highly-strung)

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