The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Dusting off the cobwebs that have collected on NikolasSchiller.com
|| 1/25/2015 || 7:05 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

These are some of the questions I was curious about during my blogging sabbatical:

What happens when a website goes cold?

Which archived entries will become the most popular?

How will idleness affect search engine algorithms?

What will the daily traffic be on this cobweb?

I never formally gave up blogging here. Instead, I simply added the text “i’m currently on daily blogging sabbatical, but i’ll be back very soon.” to the top of the page in the spring of 2011.

I essentially created a digital snapshot-in-time. Looking back at the chronological edit archive, I added a few entries in the spring 2012 & backdated them to the summer 2011, but from then on, it’s been intentionally silent on this website. I was curious about what would happen when this website was paused.

Most websites go offline, but few go on pause. It’s much easier to start a free blog on Tumblr than it is to have your own domain name, purchase a website hosting package, install the content management system, and keep everything running smoothly. Pause also costs money, and in my case, to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year. From dozens of domain names to the hosting package that keeps all the websites running, keeping my small stake of land on the World Wide Web has been both time-consuming and expensive. But it has also been quite rewarding to have this digital time capsule alive and online, albeit collecting dust.

Over the last few years much of my attention has gone to updating different websites that I was paid to manage. This made the intentional neglect of this website much easier to handle. I also never set a specific date that I would return because I didn’t want to be arbitrarily pressured to end my blogging sabbatical.

In lieu of posting new content here, I’ve also kept a secondary scrapbook during these silent years that includes some of my more memorable accomplishments, creations, and endeavors. Over the coming days & weeks I plan to regularly add new entries to the archives in order reflect what has transpired over the last few years. Concurrently, I also plan on recoding the layout of this website because it’s in desperate need of a makeover.

Welcome back! Pardon the dust.

A Reverse Chronological Listing of All DC History Entries
|| 1/1/2011 || 12:00 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

One drawback of blogs is that they show entries in reverse chronological order, meaning the newest entries shows up first and the last entry shows up last. Yet this only deals with the exact time & date in which the blog entry was published on-line and not the time in which the content of the blog entry covers in history. As regular readers know, for the last two years the bulk of my blog entries have dealt with the history of the District of Columbia. I’ve literally spend hundreds of hours copying & transcribing history in order to share it here. The method in which I chose the articles was not scientific by any means, rather it was more of a scattered approach of looking throughout the internet for items that related to the topic. The result is a reverse chronological order of items that randomly bounce around dates over the last 200 years. In order to organize these entries into a more coherent historical listing, I decided to go through all related blog entries and put them all in chronological order based on the approximate date the content was originally published in history. Months ago, when I first conceived this listing, I realized that the hardest part of the listing was not putting it together, but, rather, keeping it updated in a timely fashion. By manually coding the listing, every time I publish a new entry, I’ll need to go back to the page and edit that as well in order to keep the listing accurate. Nonetheless, I am very proud of the work I completed over the last two years on this project and I hope others find these entries to be a valuable resource.

You can view the timelines here: https://www.nikolasschiller.com/blog/index.php/dc-history-timeline/

Discontinuing FeedBurner – Time To Update Your RSS Feed
|| 2/12/2010 || 12:27 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Back in September of 2009 I decided to try using FeedBurner for my blog’s RSS feed. For the most part I thought it worked fine, but that was until I posted the 1910 Newspaper Publication Calendars. Due to their size, they completely clogged up my blog RSS feed to the point where only two blog entries were syndicated during the entire month of January. Instead of arbitrarily limiting the size of my future blog entries, I’ve decided to just get rid of FeedBurner and go back to my original RSS feed system. Granted I might change this again sometime in the future, but for now you can resubscribe to:

wp-rss2.php

I use Google Reader to read most blogs RSS feeds.

51 Random Banners Now Greet Visitors
|| 12/26/2009 || 1:21 pm || 2 Comments Rendered || ||

Banner Graphic Featuring A Detail from The Vicissitude of the Seasons Explained

New banner graphic featuring my name written in Hebrew over
“The Vicissitude of the Seasons Explained” from Bowles 1780 Map of the World

On Christmas night I got a random Facebook message from a Peruvian friend of mine who recently moved to Israel. After we were done chatting, I asked the same request I’ve asked a few other times to friends in distant lands, “Can you translate my name into ____Hebrew____?” A few moments later I was sent the basis for these six new banners. Now my name is now randomly displayed in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, and Russian.

Below are the rest of the new banner graphics hyperlinked to their original blog entries:

Swampoodle Quilt #2

Banner Graphic Featuring Swampoodle Quilt No.2

Racine Quilt #2

Banner Graphic Featuring Racine Quilt No. 2

West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt

Vassar Quilt Refraction
$Banner Graphic Featuring Vassar Quilt Refraction$

University of Southern California Quilt

Related Entries:

Added to the Sidebar: Feedjit
|| 11/21/2009 || 5:17 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

To add a little more bloat to this website, I’ve added a little sidebar widget that shows the real-time internet traffic on my blog. If you are curious about what other people happen to be looking for, its a fun way to explore the random content in my blog’s archives. Click the image above to view the traffic in a new window or scroll down and see where in the world the visitor before you was from.

5 More Random Banners Now ‘Greek’ Visitors
|| 9/19/2009 || 3:47 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

Banner Graphic Featuring I-35W Bridge Quilt #2

New banner graphic featuring my name written in Greek over I-35W Bridge Quilt #2

About a month ago I had a random friend request on Facebook from a woman named Athina who lives in Greece. Opting to inflate my friend count over potential security fears, I added her without question. A couple weeks later I visited her Facebook page and noticed that she has a blog that was written completely in the Greek language. I had just posted my latest batch of banners using the Cyrillic alphabet, so I sent her an e-mail asking if she’d be interested in translating my name into Greek. She obliged and today I made 5 more banners to be randomly displayed.

Greek is one of the languages I’ve always wanted to learn. I spent some time in high school taking Latin, which I have since found to be an invaluable contribution to my continued exploration of history. But Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean around the time of the birth of Christ, has always fascinated me. The Septuagint, a 3rd century B.C. Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, used this dialect of the language. And while modern Greek is considerably different in many aspects from it’s thousand+ year-old counterpart, I would still like to learn both or at least start getting my mind around the alphabet.

Now I would be remiss if I didn’t return the cultural exchange for my friend Athina who did the translation for me. She owns a yacht charter company called Stamatis Yachting, which offers a wide variety of yachts that can take you & your friends around the various Greek islands. They also have skippers that can be contracted so you don’t have to know how to sail in order to experience the joys of sailing on the Mediterranean. If you are planning on a trip to Greece in the near future, please do not hesitate to contact her about chartering one of their yachts.

Below are the rest of the new banner graphics hyperlinked to their original blog entries:

+ MORE

Photograph Of The Daily Render On Two Computer Monitors
|| 9/3/2009 || 7:42 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Photograph Of This Website On Two Computer Monitors

Photograph of this website on two monitors with a portion of Seattle Quilt in the background

I was over at my friend’s house the other day and noticed that my recent layout redesign allows this website to be viewed on multiple monitors. By removing the old tables that guided the layout of this website and changing to CSS, a change that should have been done years ago, the usage of the float:right property pushes the sidebar to rightmost portion of the browser window. Previously the layout would have kept the sidebar next to the central panel and would have only stretched into the second monitor if and only if there was a wide image in the central panel. Now you can stretch the browser as wide as you want and the space between the sidebar & central panel contains beautiful tessellations of maps previously published on this website.

Anyways, I still plan on making a few more tweaks to the layout, so please pardon any digital dust during this much-needed remodeling phase.

40 Random Banners Now Greet You
|| 8/31/2009 || 10:27 pm || 2 Comments Rendered || ||

A banner graphic featuring my name written using the Cyrillic alphabet over my map New York Public Library Quilt

New banner graphic featuring my name written using the Cyrillic alphabet over my map New York Public Library Quilt

The last time I added new banner graphics to this website was back in July of 2007 and since I’ve been updating the layout of this website lately, I decided to add some new banners into the mix. Earlier today a friend of mine who specializes in the Russian language responded to an e-mail I sent her about Google’s translation of my name. Her response indicated that the translation was infact an incorrect spelling and she offered a substitute spelling. I was then able to cut & paste the text and make six new banners that feature my name using the Cyrillic alphabet over the top of previously made maps on this website. In conjunction with the first batch of banner graphics that I made, there are now 40 different banner graphics that are randomly displayed each time a page on this blog is loaded.

Below are the rest of the new banner graphics hyperlinked to their original blog entries:

+ MORE

New Splash Page Graphic Added: “Come in. Don’t steal anything.”
|| 7/12/2009 || 3:42 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

The other night my housemate had some friends over and left this note in the front of our house. I thought it was cute, so I snapped a photo. Since the splash page of my website is somewhat like a front door, I felt it would make a nice addition to the current images that are randomly displayed each time you visit. I don’t have the exact number of visual combinations at the moment because the folder that contains most of the maps stops counting at 2,000 images, but I think the number is around 2,500 images.

As for the context of the note, I find it extremely interesting how people use the content I have placed on my website. I have a Fair Use link at the bottom of the page, but most people don’t really follow my request for proper citation. I wouldn’t call it outright theft, which would be claiming what I have created here as their own original artwork, but most of the time people will just use an image without the link back or a note about me. Oh well, there is not much I can do except e-mail them the proper link to use.

Note: The splash page graphic was randomly placed over University of Southern California Quilt

The Daily Render Newsletter
|| 3/11/2009 || 4:15 pm || Comments Off on The Daily Render Newsletter || ||

Greetings,

Its been quite a few months since I sent an e-mail to this list of 2596 awesome people.
Sorry for the delay. Expect another e-mail in about a month!

This e-mail is about:

1) One year anniversary of being listed in search engines
2) Deaccessioning my maps / on-line store refurbishment
3) Books & touring exhibition updates
4) The Colonial Status
5) LOTS of Website Updates

Curious? Good. Scroll slowly….

Continue Reading:

+ MORE

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A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future.

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: