The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Taking a break from blogging for most of the month
|| 1/2/2009 || 1:11 pm || Comments Off on Taking a break from blogging for most of the month || ||

So this entry is being written on Friday January 23, 2009 and its being back dated along with all the subsequent entries. As an someone who enjoys experimenting, I wanted to see what happened if I didn’t update this website for the entire month. Since there is still a week left and I’m adding this entry, it means that my experiment is over. I’ll have the results posted later….

And so begins 2009…
|| 12/31/2008 || 11:59 pm || Comments Off on And so begins 2009… || ||

…and this website is need in of some new years cleaning. I need to update the total map count of the year as well as finish off the 2009 calendars. This year I’d also like to change the 4-year-old layout of this website to add some freshness and hopefully aggregate the maps on this website into an nicely printed atlas. I didn’t make as many maps this year because I’ve ran out of storage space on my hard drives and my CD burner is need of some TLC. However, I hope to continue making more maps in 2009 and hopefully expand my coverage on this website and post more about what I am reading instead of what I’m seeing & making.

For New Years Eve, I went to a my friend’s penthouse apartment and celebrated the start of the New Year. The YouTube video below features the countdown, champagne showers, and the fireworks going off near the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington, DC.

Happy New Years!

Adding my Shared Items from Google Reader as daily blog entries
|| 12/22/2008 || 5:25 pm || Comments Off on Adding my Shared Items from Google Reader as daily blog entries || ||

I’ve found that the number one reason why I don’t post more blog entries is that I’m busy reading other blogs. For the last moth I’ve been working on a means to add these blog entries here, and I’ve finally gone ahead & troubleshooted all the bells & whistles to begin doing this.

First I added a widget from Google that shows my 10 most recent shared items to the sidebar on the right side of the blog. These show up in realtime and link to the various blog entries that I’ve liked. Secondly, I’ve added the Postalicious plugin that subscribes to my Shared Items RSS feed and will aggregate the shared items each day. Then they will automatically be posted in the mornings at 8am under the title “DAILY LINKS.” I’m hoping they’ll become a nice feature for this website that will not require too much extra effort.

One issue that I’ve found to be slightly annoying with this route is that since I am reading the blogs through an RSS reader that is subscribed to blogs that use Feedburner, many of the links that I’ll be posting are not the direct links themselves, but forwarding links. This means that over time these links are likely to degrade more quickly than the actual blog URLs because Feedburner might upgrade their permalink structure rendering these links useless in a couple years. I guess I’ll just have to deal with this issue as times go on, but I’m aware of it and will try to figure out a means to share the direct URLs in the future.

4 Issues with my upgrade to WordPress 2.7
|| 12/21/2008 || 11:35 pm || Comments Off on 4 Issues with my upgrade to WordPress 2.7 || ||

Last week I upgrade to WordPress 2.7 and the week before that I upgraded to 2.6.5 from version 2.3. For this entry, I’ve isolated my four main issues that I’ve came across since upgrading.

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A dual purpose QR-Code added to the splash page
|| 11/10/2008 || 12:10 pm || Comments Off on A dual purpose QR-Code added to the splash page || ||

QR-Code superimposed over a zoom in of Good Hope Quilt #3

To this day, one of my favorite parts of this website is my splash page. By using the random image generator, there are well over thousands of different visual combinations that you might see when visiting this website’s splash page. Today I decided to add what consider to be a “meta” or dual purpose QR-Code to the splash page. The dual purpose aspect is that its both the HTML link and decoded QR-Code mean the exact same thing: https://nikolasschilller.com/blog/ – So if someone doesn’t read this entry, and decides to decode the QR-Code on the splash page, they’ll be given the same link that they’d receive if they simply clicked on the QR-Code. I could have made the QR-Code link to some random photograph hidden on this website saying “You’ve won a million dollars!!” —but I didn’t (okay I still might make another). Instead if someone takes a screen grab of the splash page that shows the QR-Code and then reposts the image somewhere else, the embedded link back to my website will still exist in the QR-Code.

Related QR-Code Entries:

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Ordered Today: A New & Arabesque Map of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden
|| 10/2/2008 || 1:00 pm || Comments Off on Ordered Today: A New & Arabesque Map of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden || ||

Today I finally got around to ordering this unique map. I’ve been wanting to get it printed for a couple months but I could not decide on how I wanted it to be printed, matted, and framed. Specifically, I had the most trouble choosing which mat to use because I wanted the color to slightly match the map and since the map is partially black & white, I decided on a grey hued mat. When it arrives in a couple weeks I’ll know if my choice was decent or not. Regardless, I am happy that my other antique map now has a companion.

Ordered Today: New York Public Library Quilt
|| 9/15/2008 || 11:11 pm || Comments Off on Ordered Today: New York Public Library Quilt || ||

In conjunction with my upcoming presentation at next month’s meeting of the New York Map Society, I decided to order a copy of the map and will be donating it to the Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division at the New York Public Library. It will printed out quite large at 60″ x 40″ on HahnemÃ¼hle Fine Art Pearl 285gsm paper and should be a splendid addition to their permanent collection.

Welcome Robots and Strangers
|| 3/14/2008 || 1:48 pm || Comments Off on Welcome Robots and Strangers || ||

Below is the text of an e-mail I sent out today:

One year ago today my ugly mug was on the front page of the Washington Post’s style section in David Montgomery’s article “Here Be Dragons.” To celebrate the one year anniversary of this 15 minutes of fame I did something I’ve been waiting a VERY long time to do– I removed the Robots Exclusion Protocols from my website. This means that in a few weeks you will be able to find the contents of my website with a simple search string from your favorite search engine.

Before 12:01am today, you could only search the contents of my website on my website. By preventing my website from being crawled by spiders (or robots as they are technically called) I also prevented anyone [strangers] from freely accessing the hundreds of maps that I’ve made over the last 4 years. Thus the paradox of making maps without being able to be found is now over, and in that respect I am liberating myself from the self-censorship experiment that I’ve been conducting these last few years.

Frankly, dear reader, its a very nice feeling. I am unaware of any website that has opened itself up to the robots with over a 1,000 different pages to index at once. I sincerely wonder what search words will bring people to my website from this day forward. Currently postmodern art is my number one search string (I am currently listed at #5)– and that was only possible because of the article that was published one year ago today. So with that said, today marks the beginning of a new phase in my life, and maybe yours– if you search for the right words.

Random Banners Now Greet You – continued
|| 7/20/2007 || 2:35 pm || Comments Off on Random Banners Now Greet You – continued || ||

Banner created from Star of Guinea-Bissau

In March of this year I created 15 banners that are displayed randomly each time the website loads. Earlier this week a friend of mine in Shanghai, China sent me my name in Simplified Chinese. She also sent me some useful words I plan on adding to some future maps. I’ve decided to make another batch of banners using this text. There are now a total of 34 different banners.

View the new banners after the fold…

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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: