

Show HN: Save reading time with the TL;DR PLZ bookmarklet  - zerostar07

Hey all, this is a small bookmarklet my partner made last week to save short summaries of long-winded web posts. Hopefully you can help others save time by sharing your TL;DRs with the world. You can also up/downvote the TL;DRs other users post. It should work with your iPad, too.<p>http://tldrplz.com
======
SeoxyS
People need to stop reading so much crap and so many summaries, and learn to
focus on reading a long article for 20min.

~~~
doublesprout
Summaries are not necessarily crap and people need some way to tell if what
they're going to read is worth their time.

In reality, all this script does is make it easier for people to filter for
what they want to read.

------
beaumartinez
Have a look at tldr.it[1]. It fetches data from Delicious to TL;DR.

[1] <http://tldr.it>

~~~
metachris
Didn't load for me - the bookmarklet is stuck on "Getting data from
Delicious".

------
jannes
This is really nice. I had a similar idea, but haven't felt ready to implement
it yet.

I think users would appreciate it if they could keep track of what they have
read and summarized. Like an archive for every article they have read. It
would let users take a look into their past and let them see what kind of
texts they were reading a long time ago. It would help users to remember
things that they have long forgotten. Also, humans tend to like collecting and
gathering.

One little thing: Why did you (or your friend) name it "TLDRplz"? Please
remind yourself what TL;DR means. It's a statement, not a noun that's
synonymous to "summary". I think it's annoying to see it used that way.

~~~
zerostar07
Thanks for your remarks. If this ever gets traction, that would be a great
next step.

I don't like the name either because it's atrocious grammatically and
unpronounceable but, i often encounter blogs and comments that end in "tl;dr:
this and that" (that's actually where the idea came from). I think it's pretty
self-explanatory to the reddit / blogging crowd.

P.S. I dont know who added the "tl;dr" for the current page, but it made me
giggle, thanks.

------
barapa
This is a great concept...of course, it needs many users to be effective. A
couple suggestions (that you probably are already thinking about):

1 - You need a distinctive favicon, because it is so important

2 - When you submit a summary, it should show you the summaries, rather than
just give you a new Captcha...it makes you think you got the captcha wrong,
even though you write somewhere that it was a success. I think we've been too
conditioned to think seeing the captcha change means success.

~~~
zerostar07
\- Unfortunately you can't set a favicon to a javascript: bookmark

\- We need to show the form again because it's the only chance to make
corrections to the summary. The obvious solution is to remove the second
captcha. Will do ASAP, thanks

------
radog
Why not also have an automated script for the vast majority of sites for which
people don't upload their own summaries? First two paragraphs and last
paragraph seem like they would do the trick 80-90% of the time.

------
zerostar07
link: <http://tldrplz.com>

------
leon_
Oh, that's really neat. I can see myself using this. I hope it gets more
popular :)

------
srkgupta
This is really awesome... I too wanted to create a site like this... something
huge like disqus... but u made it very simple and its indeed nice...

