For a minute there I thought I'd be able to paste in some text and automagically get a TL;DR. Pretty neat nonetheless.
Telescopictext
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: Telescopictext
#52This could be a very nice way of formatting a long description, such as the description of your software or startup.
Think about it: instead of greeting your visitor with a wall of text, you could have something like "XYZ is going to boost your productivity". The user would only need to expand that's interesting to him.
Re: Telescopictext
#53It might be nice to read news articles this way. Start with the headline and expand the parts that interest you the most. I can imagine it being difficult to write that way, though.
Or maybe just write the article, and present the most-important bits first, starting with the headline. Then, the first paragraph or so would cover the important points, and as you kept reading, it'd get less and less important.
That's exactly how all news stories are written. Unless you were making a joke.
Re: Telescopictext
#54I wish 99% of all articles I read worked this way.
Re: Telescopictext
#55I see some deeper meaning in this - in that it is an explicit way to show how communication can be parsed down so simply. Many writers/communicators want to extrapolate every thought into word tombs - when they can very often be summated in something as small as "I made tea." Beautiful execution, here, on getting me (and hopefully others) to think about writing/communicating more simplistically - and then actually do…
As I was playing with it, I was thinking about how it illustrates the way magnifying different aspects can give a different feeling to one's writing. Like: can I get better emphasis by keeping a particular facet short and direct, or does it pay to expand on it?
So I think it's not just about keeping it simple, but seeing where simple might be better, or where depth might be better.
Re: Telescopictext
#56Now someone should make a tool that expands from specification to actual code like this. How would that work?
Re: Telescopictext
#57This is great. All too often I've posted some rant, knowing it must be very concise to get the point across to soundbite readers, yet wanting to provide details to address obvious criticisms, yet having to somehow find a balance between minimal meme transfer vs. encyclopedic thoroughness overwhelming the basic meme. Hope this can be turned into a blogging/commenting tool.
Re: Telescopictext
#58This is great. All too often I've posted some rant, knowing it must be very concise to get the point across to soundbite readers, yet wanting to provide details to address obvious criticisms, yet having to somehow find a balance between minimal meme transfer vs. encyclopedic thoroughness overwhelming the basic meme. Hope this can be turned into a blogging/commenting tool.
There's got to be an easy HTML template for doing this without linking to an external website.
Re: Telescopictext
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for the TLDR. I wondered whether the text would just keep expanding forever... In some ways I am sad that it did not.
The only way to make it expand forever would be to support recursion. Would be interesting what texts you could come up with that. Kind of a textual Mandelbrot set.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...)
Re: Telescopictext
#60Doesn't work on iOS Safari.
Nuts; that's my primary personal content creation platform now.