5 ms·

Show HN: Summary Brew – Summaries for Top 300 HN Stories and Books

23 points by hack4supper 9y ago

hack4supper 9y ago
Hey HN, I made this project during a very difficult time of my life. I was unemployed and was having a non stop roller coaster in my marriage. This project was created due to my own frustrations of having multiple tabs open of articles and not reading them ... and just hoarding on tabs (some have been open for 2 years). This is the first iteration. Any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. Any suggestions are also welcome. Also awaiting any other comments.
kevinios 9y ago
Great job! Thank you. Quick suggestion: could you show the summaries directly on your first page, without the user needing to clicks links? (Otherwise, we are back to part of the original problem: need to open many tabs to read each story's summary, or do a lot of back and forth between front-page and post's summary). In case there would be too much text when doing this, another way to solve this would be to unroll the summary dynamically when user clicks "summary" (instead of opening a new page). Hope this is useful!
- hack4supper 9y ago
  Hmm I did have for a moment this page as the home page - https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top, but wasnt sure if people will like having that as the home page. I should do a survey about which page should be in the front, well to ask any HN readers who now check out the site, could you let me know that is the current home page the way to go or is this one https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top Also your idea of unrolling the entire summary text on clicking something like "summary" is awesome, didnt think of that. Thank you kindly for your words of support and your suggestions.
  - gupir 9y ago
    I'd like to see the full summary and with column (Pinterest-like), with height limiting.
abhirag 9y ago
Well done! I hope things are better now :) Quick suggestion: Include a line describing what the website does on the main page, users can go to the about page and figure it out but it would be better to have a quick intro of what the site is all about as soon as they visit it. You can probably remove it once the website is more well known but the title isn't self explanatory, so an intro would help. Stack used? Probably Elixir+Phoenix judging from your post history, what are your impressions about that stack? I use pinboard archival account for this use-case, but I think some readers here might find this site useful :)
- hack4supper 9y ago
  Thank you for your kind words ... as for my personal life, I am still fighting to make things better. I did think of adding a quick line on the main page, but never implemented it, thinking it will be self explanatory, but you are right, to have it until the site gets popular. Yes the stack is Elixir + Phoenix. I was a rails and meteor guy prior to that. I like really like Elixir as a language, the excellent documentation helped quite a lot. Also the community around it is very eager to help. As for Phoenix, again its the community weight that shows its strength, being helpful and adding more open source libraries every week. I think if there was one feature where rails at the moment triumphs phoenix is in the number of open source libraries/packages/gems. Elixir + Phoenix sips on server memory. Could you kindly explain more about how a pinboard archival account compares to summarybrew. Again thanks for leaving a comment.
gupir 9y ago
I think you should display the best summary on the home page list, and a link to know more about and other summaries. Put a minimum threshold for votes to increase first-page quality, and voila, I have a newsletter that I would love to use.
- hack4supper 9y ago
  Now I think that is a neat idea, a combination of the post and the best summary on the home page or like the first 2 lines of the summary, since some can run quite long, with a link for the rest of the summaries. Thanks bud for the suggestion.
lozzo 9y ago
why not just a long long page (300 does not really need paging) ?
- hack4supper 9y ago
  I am not sure if I got your question correctly, but to answer, to the best of my understanding ... its the top 300 posts at any given time ... and they change everyday (even every hour)
  - thereau 9y ago
    He means that you can list all of the 300 posts in the page and get rid of the next and prev page buttons

23 points by hack4supper 9y ago

Hey HN, I made this project during a very difficult time of my life. I was unemployed and was having a non stop roller coaster in my marriage. This project was created due to my own frustrations of having multiple tabs open of articles and not reading them ... and just hoarding on tabs (some have been open for 2 years). This is the first iteration. Any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. Any suggestions are also welcome. Also awaiting any other comments.

kevinios 9y ago

Great job! Thank you. Quick suggestion: could you show the summaries directly on your first page, without the user needing to clicks links? (Otherwise, we are back to part of the original problem: need to open many tabs to read each story's summary, or do a lot of back and forth between front-page and post's summary). In case there would be too much text when doing this, another way to solve this would be to unroll the summary dynamically when user clicks "summary" (instead of opening a new page). Hope this is useful!

hack4supper 9y ago
Hmm I did have for a moment this page as the home page - https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top, but wasnt sure if people will like having that as the home page. I should do a survey about which page should be in the front, well to ask any HN readers who now check out the site, could you let me know that is the current home page the way to go or is this one https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top Also your idea of unrolling the entire summary text on clicking something like "summary" is awesome, didnt think of that. Thank you kindly for your words of support and your suggestions.
- gupir 9y ago
  I'd like to see the full summary and with column (Pinterest-like), with height limiting.

abhirag 9y ago

Well done! I hope things are better now :) Quick suggestion: Include a line describing what the website does on the main page, users can go to the about page and figure it out but it would be better to have a quick intro of what the site is all about as soon as they visit it. You can probably remove it once the website is more well known but the title isn't self explanatory, so an intro would help. Stack used? Probably Elixir+Phoenix judging from your post history, what are your impressions about that stack? I use pinboard archival account for this use-case, but I think some readers here might find this site useful :)

hack4supper 9y ago
Thank you for your kind words ... as for my personal life, I am still fighting to make things better. I did think of adding a quick line on the main page, but never implemented it, thinking it will be self explanatory, but you are right, to have it until the site gets popular. Yes the stack is Elixir + Phoenix. I was a rails and meteor guy prior to that. I like really like Elixir as a language, the excellent documentation helped quite a lot. Also the community around it is very eager to help. As for Phoenix, again its the community weight that shows its strength, being helpful and adding more open source libraries every week. I think if there was one feature where rails at the moment triumphs phoenix is in the number of open source libraries/packages/gems. Elixir + Phoenix sips on server memory. Could you kindly explain more about how a pinboard archival account compares to summarybrew. Again thanks for leaving a comment.

gupir 9y ago

I think you should display the best summary on the home page list, and a link to know more about and other summaries. Put a minimum threshold for votes to increase first-page quality, and voila, I have a newsletter that I would love to use.

hack4supper 9y ago
Now I think that is a neat idea, a combination of the post and the best summary on the home page or like the first 2 lines of the summary, since some can run quite long, with a link for the rest of the summaries. Thanks bud for the suggestion.

lozzo 9y ago

why not just a long long page (300 does not really need paging) ?

hack4supper 9y ago
I am not sure if I got your question correctly, but to answer, to the best of my understanding ... its the top 300 posts at any given time ... and they change everyday (even every hour)
- thereau 9y ago
  He means that you can list all of the 300 posts in the page and get rid of the next and prev page buttons