Ergonomics for new users

[ldrumm]

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The lessons are a bit spread out and are in several distinct formats. It would benefit new users and contributors if the barrier to entry was lower. This ticket is a nebulous list of "nice-to-haves" I jotted down after my first impression

It would be good if the following were supported:

1. A single html overview with a table of contents linking directly to each individual lesson
2. standalone markdown files that can be read / edited / rendered outside a browser context (has important accessibility benefits for all users)
3. Use of html / markdown everywhere
4. automatic regeneration of PDFs if they're worth keeping in the repository

1,2, and 4 should be relatively straightforward; 3 is achievable with some manual labour:

1. This could be a trivial list html file with a manually curated TOC
2. standalone markdown files are supported by reveal.js e.g.:

   <div class="reveal">
       <div class="slides">
   
           <section data-markdown="./assets/md/talk.md"
                    data-separator="(^---$|^---\?.*)"
                    data-separator-vertical="(^\+\+\+$|^\+\+\+\?.*)"
                    data-separator-notes="^Note:"
                    data-charset="utf-8">
           </section>
   

3. Powerpoint slides will need converting to the reveal.js format
4. This could be automated with selenium, for example.

A final nice-to-have might be to automatically deploy a github pages asset so users don't even have to clone the repo to access the lecture material; this would certainly "ease" users in - though they'll likely want to clone later to complete the exercises

[AerialMantis]

Thanks for the feedback @ldrumm, we'll look into these.