Chris Aldrich
Hello! I’m Chris. I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It’s also my online commonplace book.
Below, you’ll find a variety of media types I publish. You’ll also see lists of categories I frequently publish to including IndieWeb, mathematics, information theory, biology, history, economics, humanities, note taking & related topics. If you’re interested in more niche sub-topics, I have a list of tags available for searching and following as well.
As a member of the IndieWeb movement/community, I follow many of their principles including owning all of my own data by publishing it on my own website. When I participate on most social media sites, I generally post here first and syndicate/cross-post duplicates out to them (POSSE). In some cases, I may post to social services first and then immediately syndicate copies of that content to my own website (PESOS). This site supports the receipt of Webmention notifications and, when possible, will show replies from other websites. If you @mention me on Twitter or link to my posts there, I should receive notifications here and can show those replies as comments on my posts.
You’re welcome to subscribe to or follow my content in any manner or on any platform you prefer. However, keep in mind that the canonical copies live on this site and are the most complete. You’d have to follow me on a plethora of sites to be able to follow even a small portion of my online content output, and even then you’ll find that this is the only site with complete copies of all of it.
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 month or reasonably plan to do in the coming weeks. What am I focused on Now? Finishing up recovery from the Eaton Fire on January 7, 2025 A new roof on the house…
These are the arguments we made for 3D Atlas back in 1993 https://mathbabe.org/2017/03/23/guest-post-in-praise-of-globes/
Syndicated copies:
I can’t wait until WordPress.TV (presumably) posts this up in a few weeks. This sounds a lot like Brianna’s talking about a web-enabled commonplace book, a topic which intrigues me greatly and the purpose for which I’m most often using my own site.
In looking briefly at her personal site, I don’t see lots of evidence of her use of the idea, so I’m guessing that she’s either keeping it privately on her back end, password protected, or on another site altogether like I do for some of my content. Her talk mentions this, so I’m excited to see how she executes on it.
I’m also curious, after having recently remotely attended the Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 conference, how she’s archiving and backing it up for future generations, particularly if she’s keeping large chunks privately.
I’m keeping my eyes open to see if she posts slides from her presentation.
Update December 10, 2017:
Here are links to the slides (Google Docs version).
The video has also been posted today on WordPress.tv:
Brianna Privett: The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse
Syndicated copies:
one of my personal/private itches is to have a events platform like meetup but also kinda like facebook events
https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
On the IndieWeb front there are some interesting evolving examples and state of the art documented at:
https://indieweb.org/personal_library
https://indieweb.org/read
In particular, I quite enjoy the micropub client IndieBookClub for posting reading updates to my WordPress site (it supports other platforms with Micropub support too.) More details: https://indieweb.org/indiebookclub. Here’s an example of how I’m tracking what I read on my own site: https://boffosocko.com/kind/read/ or if you want just the books.
If you’d like a non-WordPress hosted solution, you might take a look at Manton Reece’s excellent Micro.blog platform which has a nice book/reading UI: https://micro.blog/discover/books or https://micro.blog/discover/books/grid. (It uses IndieWeb technologies including micropub, so you can use IndieBookClub with it. You can also syndicate to it from your WordPress site if you prefer to have your own infrastructure and just join the community there for the conversation.)
I’m happy to help if you’d like further tips/pointers for any of the above.
On the Mastodon front, you might take a look at Mouse Reeve‘s Bookwyrm (GitHub) which is one of the best custom set ups in the ActivityPub space.
Back on May 29th of 2020 on a wordpress account, you made a post about repairing your Grandmother’s music box that plays the tune “Vo Luzern uf Weggis zue”. I have a small Swiss chalet style music box that plays the same tune. (Or it would if it were working, which it does not) There is a link on your post that plays the song, but it is not working. If it’s not too much trouble, could you send me a copy of that file? I can find links to recordings of the song as an instrumental, but I would love to hear what the “House Music” sounds like as a wind up music box. Thank you for your time.
Melody, I’m sorry to hear you had problems playing the audio. I’ve tweaked the original and it should work. You should be able to use that primary interface to download the original or you can stream the original file from https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Music-Box.mp3 in most browsers.
Beautiful site. Found it browsing the Indieweb Ring.
Thanks! Yours isn’t too bad either. I particularly like your collection of 88×31 buttons on your blogroll page.
Thanks, I actually use that webpage as my ‘bookmarks page’ when I go to use Library computers. Instead of having to import bookmarks from a browser — all the links to the stuff I want to read or reference are already on a webpage that I can visit.
I also use my blogroll for browsing the news as there are only a few publications that I want to read. WSJ, NYT, The Atlantic, Foreign affairs — all of these publications have higher editorial standards and better columnists than NBC or CNN that comes up when I google news. I don’t like getting news from feeds that are out of my control.
Most of the 88×31 buttons are edited screenshots of logos/titles of sites. Added some shading to some of them to look 3d.
Hi Chris
I found you via hypothesis and particularly your collection of zettelkasten annotation
I was trying to find heyde book. Just curious how did you get your hands on the translated version of the pdf
https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22Niklas+Luhmann%27s+zettelkasten%22+heyde+pdf
You are indeed a master learned person of note taking.
Bang, Sadly there isn’t one to my knowledge. I found a copy in German and made my own rough translation.
Por favor quisiera informacion sobre una cantidad de herramientas de reparación de maquinas de escribir que tengo.
Hi Chris, i love sites within IndieWeb sphere. yours is a feast for curious minds. keep it up.
Hi Chris, just wondering if you are related to the Nelson W. Aldrich IV in Dan’s [Gilded Ages Web – by Dan Allosso – MakingHistory] https://danallosso.substack.com/p/gilded-ages-web
Pat
I know there is a somewhat distant connection to Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island and later Nelson A(ldrich) Rockefeller, who I presume were IV’s progenitors. Sadly it’s distant enough that I’m not the beneficiary of the Aldrich Mansion nor any portions of their family fortune. There’s also a relationship to Hollywood director Robert Aldrich, but nothing that ever helped me out within the industry.