This is what I’m doing now.
Engineering, Science, & Research
In addition to my research work at the intersections of microbiology, information theory, and complexity theory, I run the biotech startup Apsugen, which assists cutting-edge genetics researchers in the areas of microscopy, microinjection, micromanipulation, transgenics, stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), translational medicine, epifluorescence imaging, experimental design, and custom laboratory equipment. Apsugen primarily assists researchers working with animal models including: C. elegans, drosophila, Xenopus, zebra fish, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, mice, rats, mosquitoes, and occasionally human embryos. My experience includes work with several Nobel prize winners in physiology/medicine and chemistry.
Entertainment Industry
I am also a talent manager and producer in the entertainment industry with interests in representation, distribution, finance, production, publishing, content delivery, and new media. I have spent over 20 years in entertainment representing a variety of clients in film, television, stage, music, and publishing (book publishing rights as well as ancillary rights including stage and screen adaptations and self-publishing platforms). Though my current primary focus is on writers/authors and actors, I represent a variety of multi-hyphenates as writers, directors, actors, musicians, producers. I consult in various other areas including finance and distribution in a variety of platforms and media.
I often teach entertainment related courses for the Film and Media Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University.
I’m currently working on a textbook covering how the representation business operates within and drives the entertainment industry.
Chris Aldrich on Social Media
You can follow me or find additional information about me and my work and interests via some of the following social media platforms:
If your social network of choice isn’t included above, please visit my Social Media Accounts and Links page for a huge variety of other places you can find/follow me on the internet for specific types of content.
What does Boffo Socko mean anyway?
“Boffo” and “socko” are neologisms in the family of Variety-speak after the well known business trade journal covering Tinseltown (often better known as Hollywood aka the Coast, aka H’w’d.)
Their definitions from Variety’s “slanguage” dictionary follow:
boff (also boffo, boffola) — outstanding (usually refers to box office performance); ” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ has been boffo at the B.O.” (See also, socko, whammo)
sock (also socko) — very good (usually refers to box office performance); ” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ has done socko B.O.” (See also, boff, whammo)
Incidentally, one of the first movies I saw on cable via HBO when our family first got it when I was a youth (and easily saw over 100 times that summer) was THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN. Within it, there’s a great scene where Kermit schmoozes a big Broadway producer (played by John Landis) that I’m sure must have had a profound effect on me.
Boffo Lenny! Socko Lenny!
in The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
For those interested further in the linguistic stylings of Hollywood, this cartoon does a reasonable job of running through a fair amount of it very quickly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g5jKCDWDKc
Somewhere between the granularity of following my daily updates and my about page here’s a quick outline of things I’ve been doing within the past…
Reply to Colin Walker on the idea of a required reading page I’ve been thinking some more about the idea of a required reading page.…
Happy Anniversary to Muppets Take Manhattan! 34 years ago today, the movie that helped to inspire the name of my website was released in movie theaters.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD7ZAUXGPEw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent&w=840&h=503%5D
Syndicated copies to:
Syndicated copies:
As an expert on the word boffo, I can guarantee that nothing about Trump or anything related to him could be described as such. Biden and democracy on the other hand: boffo and socko.
This Article was mentioned on monday.micro.blog
#If there’s one that that has surprised me about getting webmentions working on the new blog it’s that creating an endpoint is actually a lot easier that I initially thought. I think I had scared myself into not believing that I could make my own endpoint under the misguided impression that it was going to be beyond my limited coding knowledge.
Fuelled by yesterday’s bout of positivity I thought I’d have another look but taking a different tack. Rather than thinking about it as a whole I decided to take a more granular approach and break it down.
Chris Aldrich had previously advised looking at the old versions of the WordPress webmention plugin as they were far simpler than at present. I also decided to start from first principles and check out the W3C Recommendation to check the actual specification.
I was previously conflating the mention itself with everything that goes with it (the microformats markup etc.) but looking at the spec a webmention is simply “a POST request containing the source and target parameters” – that’s all. Consequently, an endpoint needs to receive that request, verify those parameters and respond to the sender accordingly. It’s much easier to get your head around when you look at it like that.
So, a check on the source URL (and error response if it doesn’t exist) would be something like:
if ( !isset( $_POST['source'] ) ) {http_response_code(400);
exit ('source is missing');
}
The spec also says that the receiver must check the URLs are of supported schemes (normally http or https) – so simply check if
parse_url($_POST['source'])['scheme']equals http or https. While this is listed as a ‘must’ an endpoint will still function without it and other checks will likely return errors in any event were this going to fail.The receiver “must perform an HTTP GET request on source … to confirm that it actually mentions the target” so do this using cURL to get and test against the source content, returning an error if not.
Next up, the spec says the “source document must have an exact match of the target URL” so I perform a quick lookup in the database to confirm that the target URL resolves to a post ID.
If these checks are all passed then the endpoint sends a HTTP 202 response confirming the request has been accepted. And that’s it from the actual webmention side of things.
That may look a bit long winded so here’s the short version:
Are there source and target links?
Are they valid?
Does the source contain the target link?
Does the target link point to a valid item?
What happens after that, as the saying goes, is up to you and how you want to process the webmentions.
For a webmention to be really useful you want to be able to check what type of mention it is, who it’s from, and what they say. I’m using mf2-php to parse the contents of the source page:
$jsonmf = new Mf2Parser($contents, $sourceURL, true);$mf = $jsonmf->parse();
This is so handy as it translates the source page HTML into a standardised JSON array making it easier to pick out the elements like name and webmention type, for example:
$Name = $mf['items']['0']['properties']['author']['0']['properties']['name'][0];As my ‘posts’ (or sections) for any given day all exist on the same page I have to go a level deeper if I mention one of my own posts:
$Name = $mf['items']['0']['children']["$s"]['properties']['author']['0']['properties']['name'][0];(Where ‘children’ is the collection of ‘sections’ and $s selects the correct section number.)
Once the required information is collected I add a new comment to the database (using the ID found earlier as the parent post) and send myself an email notification using PHPmailer in the same way as I do for comments.
At present, I’m only checking for Likes and Replies – anything else will just show as a standard mention but I may expand this over time.
Webmentions
Parent: [[Post ideas]]
If there’s one that that has surprised me about setting up webmentions on the new blog it’s that creating an endpoint is actually a lot easier that I initially thought. I think I had scared myself into not believing that I could create my own endpoint under the impression that it was going to be beyond my limited coding knowledge.
Fuelled by yesterday’s bout of positivity I thought I’d have another look but taking a different tack. Rather than thinking about it as a whole I decided to take a more granular approach and break it down into sections.
Chris Aldrich had previously advised looking at the old versions of the WordPress webmention plugin as they were far simpler than at present. I also decided to start from first principles and check out the W3C Recommendation to check the actual specification.
I was previously conflating the actual mention with everything that goes with it (the microformats markup etc.) but looking at the spec a webmention is simply “a POST request containing the source and target parameters” – that’s all. Consequently, an endpoint initially needs to receive that request, verify those parameters and respond accordingly to the sender. It’s much easier to get your head around when you look at it like that.
So, a check on the source URL (and response with an error if it doesn’t exist) would be something like: if ( !isset( $_POST[‘source’] ) ) { http_response_code(400); exit (‘”source” is missing’); }
The same is done for the target URL.
The spec also says that the receiver must check the URLs are of supported schemes (normally http or https) – so simply check if parse_url($_POST[‘source’])[‘scheme’] equals http or https. While this is a ‘must’ according to the spec an endpoint will still function without it and other checks will likely fail in any event.
The receiver “must perform an HTTP GET request on source … to confirm that it actually mentions the target” so do this using cURL, returning an error if not.
Next up, the spec says the “source document must have an exact match of the target URL” so I perform a quick lookup in the database to confirm that the target URL resolves to a post ID.
If these checks are all passed then you can send a HTTP 202 response confirming the request has been accepted. And that’s it from the actual webmention side of things.
That may look a bit long winded so here’s the short version: Are there source and target links? Are they valid? Does the source contain the target link? Does the target link point to a valid item?
What happens after that, as the saying goes, is up to you and how you want to process the webmentions.
For a webmention to be really useful you want to be able to check what type of mention it is, who it’s from, and what they say. I’m using mf2-php to parse the contents of the source page: $jsonmf = new Mf2Parser($contents, $sourceURL, true); $mf = $jsonmf->parse();
This is so handy as it translates the source page HTML into a standardised JSON array making it easier to pick out the elements like name and webmention type, for example: $Name = $mf[‘items’][‘0’][‘properties’][‘author’][‘0’][‘properties’][‘name’][0];
As my ‘posts’ (or sections) for any given day all exist on the same page I have to go a level deeper if I mention one of my own posts: $Name = $mf[‘items’][‘0’][‘children’][“$s”][‘properties’][‘author’][‘0’][‘properties’][‘name’][0];
(Where ‘children’ is the collection of ‘sections’ and $s selects the correct section number.)
Once the required information is collected I add a new comment to the database (using the ID found earlier as the parent post) and send myself an email notification using PHPmailer in the same way as I do for comments.
At present, I’m only checking for Likes and Replies – anything else will just show as a standard mention but I may expand this over time.
Primary Internet Presences
Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko
Chris Aldrich Social Stream
Content from the above two sites is syndicated primarily, but not exclusively, or evenly to the following silo-based profiles
Twitter–joined February 18, 2008 2:31pm
Micro.blog–joined April 27, 2017, 05:11 pm
Hypothes.is–joined January 2012
Mastodon.social (Status)–joined December 9, 2016
Mastodon: @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com (This website has beta support to look like a Mastodon instance if you’d like to follow @chrisaldrich.)
GoodReads
WordPress.com–joined March 26, 2008
Foursquare–joined December 2009
Letterboxd (Movie checkins)–joined 4/12/17
Tumblr–joined Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:43:05 -0400 (first post)
LinkedIn
Flickr–joined March 2008
Inoreader–joined October 2016
Facebook–joined April 24, 2006
Medium
Contributor to
Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist Primary website and blog
Chris Aldrich’s Social Stream
Indieweb.org (Wiki)–first wiki edit on September 11, 2014 22:55
Little Free Library #8424 Blog
WithKnown (Dormant)–joined September 10, 2014 6:04:28 +0000
Mendeley ITBio References (Dormant)
Category Theory Summer Study Group (Dormant)
JHU AEME (Defunct)
Johns Hopkins Twitter Feed (Previous)
JHU Facebook Fan Page (Previous)
Identity
Chris Aldrich (About page)
Gravatar
Keybase
About.Me
DandyID
Other Social Profiles
YouTube
Reddit
MySpace
del.icio.us –joined July 5, 2009
Fold–joined Sunday, July 5, 2015 at 1:59:55 PM GMT-07:00
Hacker News–joined October 16, 2015
Neocities–joined June 10, 2016
10c–joined February 16th 2017, 12:55:39 pm
pnut–joined Wed, 15 Mar 2017 17:46:50 +0000 Pnut id: 335
Internet Archive–joined November 25, 2017 08:54:13
Lobsters–joined November 11, 2018 19:45:19 -06:00
Unsplash–joined January 11, 2020 at 20:02
Yelp
Periscope
Pinterest
MeetUp
500px
Skitch
KickStarter
Patreon
Chris Aldrich Radio3 (Link Blog) (Dormant)
Findery
Academia / Research Related
Hypothes.is–joined January 2012
Zotero
Mendeley
Academia.edu
Research Gate
IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSOC)
Quora
ORCID–joined ~12/15/15
Genius (fka Rap Genius, aka News Genius, etc)
Diigo (Bookmarks, annotations)–joined 6/2/15
FigShare – Research Data
Worldcat
CiteULike–joined June 24, 2008, closing March 30, 2019
Open Study –closing 1/31/17
Brain.ly –joined 11/30/16
StackExchange
Math-Stackexchange
MathOverflow
TeX-StackExchange
Linguistics-StackExchange
Digital Signal Processing-StackExchange
Cooking-StackExchange
Physics Forums
Chris Aldrich shared a great idea the other day in the Hypothes.is Liquid Margins Webinar on November 16, 2021. Robin DeRosa moderated the discussion and featured instructors who had used Hypothes.is with their students to annotate open educational resources (OER) and in some cases to create OER. The chat was lively, fun, and full of great ideas. One of the best meetings of this kind I’ve attended in a very long time.
Recently, I reread a post from Robin DeRosa about her colla
I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.
Chris Aldrich’s Website (boffosocko.com)
I encountered Chris Aldrich’s site before I learned about the IndieWeb, a community of people who are interested in making personal websites and taking control over their data. When I started diving deeper into the IndieWeb, I realised that Chris was part of the community. Chris had even written about quite a few IndieWeb topics, including an introductory guide to the IndieWeb community which helped me get started and learn how the community worked.
Chris’ website is an excellent example of how you can take control of your data without using code. Chris posts likes, comments, bookmarks, and over a dozen types of posts on his website. Some posts are created elsewhere and syndicated to his site using an approach called POSSE (publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere). Other posts are written on his site. You can go to lists like drinks or annotations or bookmarks to see posts that fit under those categories. Want to know what blogs Chris finds interesting? Check out his Follows page. These posts are all well categorised which means you can easily follow along with what you find most interesting.
In the “About” section of Chris’ website, he talks about how his site works. One page shows the plugins he uses in WordPress, the content management system he uses. Another page shows the philosophy and structure behind his site. Chris’ documentation is an excellent resource. Documenting what you build with your site makes it easy for others to learn. Notably, WordPress does not require code to use. As a result, Chris’ documentation may be especially useful to those who want to make a powerful site without using code.
Chris posts longer form content on his site regularly. He blogs about many topics from the IndieWeb to websites to digital gardens and commonplace books. If you are new to the IndieWeb and want to learn more about the community, I cannot recommend the called “An Introduction to the IndieWeb” guide I mentioned at the beginning of this article. If you are interested in organising information using wikis and similar structures, a quick search around Chris’ site will yield lots of information you can use to dive deeper.
Chris’ site has a lot of pages to explore. They are organised with a sidebar that appears on the left of the page. I love this arrangement. The sidebar has a clear logical order even as you expand each menu to look at other parts of the site. There are also category and tag links as well as a search bar that are useful for navigating around the site. Chris’ is open about how his site is both a blog and a commonplace book. Thus, the architecture may be different to some blogs you have seen, but that only means that you’ll definitely learn a thing or two about how sites can be organised.
Before I finish, I have to mention that Chris’ site currently has a seasonal background that comprises his “holiday theme,” a change in a website based on particular events. The IndieWeb wiki has a dedicated page showing examples of holiday themes if you want to learn more about decorating your site for events.
That’s it for this post! I could spend many more words discussing Chris site — and indeed all of the other sites in this series — but I want to encourage you to explore every site you find interesting yourself. Only through exploration will you be able to find the hidden gems and interesting articles that resonate most with you. I shall see you tomorrow for the next edition of this series.
This Article was mentioned on crawlson.com