Walden Pond

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You're all done with setting up. We'll send you an edition at the beginning of next month. If you need to change anything then look in the menu.

Getting Started

Before we can send you anything, we need two things from you:

  • First this:
    ❓A connection to your Pocket account
    Authenticate with pocket
  • Then this:
    ❓Some payment and address details
    Subscribe with Stripe

Welcome back to Walden Pond!

I'd love to hear about how this is all going for you! Give me suggestions and I'll do my best to make them happen.

Editorial Controls

We make each edition specifically for you. Tell us a bit about how you'd like us to do that:

Loading your Pocket data for a graph. We love graphs but if you have a lot in your Pocket, this can take a long time. (You don't need to wait for it to finish before you change the sliders below.)

If there's not much in your Pocket, and you're looking for some fascinating articles to save, there a lot here. It's a list of everything that had been printed in a Walden Pond edition up until edition 6.

Controls

What's the maximum length of article that you'd like?

What's the minimum length of article that you'd like?

Pocket has been going for a long time, so you might have articles that are that old too. Maybe you want to read them, but this lets you filter for only newer articles.

What colour paper you'd like? We recommend cream, it's relaxing and it's easy on your eyes.

The tag wpmustprint makes articles be prioritised for inclusion in your upcoming edition. If you want to add more tags that do this, put them in here:

Write them as a comma separated list, e.g.: knitting, malt, mountain bike will give you three extra tags.

If you want to include articles with specific words in the title, put them in here:

Write them as a comma separated list, e.g.: car, typography, plastic bag will give you articles like:

  • Not All Electric Vehicles Are Cars, You Know
  • Are cotton totes better for the Earth than plastic bags? It depends on what you care about
  • Rhythm in Web Typography

But it will also give you "The secret life of Wetherspoon’s freaky carpets" because there is a car in carpets.

We use a modified Knapsack algorithm to pick articles for your edition so it has the right amount of content. It's the nicest way to get a variety of lengths and ages of articles. You can read about it here. We call it "big rock" because it make sure that you have at least one long article to read.

If you want your articles to come out like a plate stack, then chose LIFO (Last in, First Out). This takes the most recent thing that you've saved and puts it at the start of your edition, and so on until you've used up your time.

If you've picked LiFo, you probably want to pick a non-magic sorting strategy too.

The knapsack algorithm orders the editions by magic. If you want a more predictable ordering, then here's your chance.

You might want this if you're reading a series of articles, or you like to read news, and you don't want spoilers.

Would you like your name on the spine? We think you should—you are the editor of this fine volume after all—but some might like it to be a bit more incognito on the bookshelf.

About Me

This is how your name will be on your edition, and on the envelope.


Where should we send your edition?

Walden Pond

This site is run by Ben Doherty, in Sydney, Australia. That's why getting something to read in the cafe or on the beach is so important!

If you've got an idea about how to make the zine or the site better, email Ben at ben@waldenpond.press or submit an issue on GitHub.

You can keep an eye on what's going on by following along:

  • The GitHub logoA circle with the GitHub cat in the centre. notionparallax
  • The Twitter logoThe twitter bird in a single colour. WaldenPondZine

The site is made out of a mishmash of Jekyll, Firebase, Stripe and Pocket. I wouldn't trust me to handle payments but that's what Stripe are really good at. The same goes for auth and databases with Firebase.

Walden Pond is a printed zine that is full of the bits of the web that you are actually interested in. One way to think of it is as a Pocket client made of paper.

You can read about our TOS & Privacy