I'm searching for a travel blog that wrote a tutorial on how they created custom SVG animations for the routes he took along his trips.
I've been banging my head against Google for a solid 3-4 hours at this point but it is pointless to try to search something there these days so I come here.
I remember that the blogger in question was into photography and photographed the Te Whanganui-A-Hei (Cathedral Cove) in New Zealand during early morning with no people there and wrote a post about the process. And of course they had these small SVG animations of their trips at the top of their posts, with a map displaying the route they took, animating the path.
They wrote a pretty in-depth article about how they accomplished this with the help of some custom JS and SVG animations too and I am after that article.
If you know the name of the blog that would absolutely make my day!
Please also feel free to answer if you know anything similar to the title of the blog where somebody has created stylized animated SVG maps of their trips and documented the process they used to create those.
Is it this one? https://photos.paulstamatiou.com/new-zealand/coromandel-peni...
EDIT: Any HN mods/devs reading this -- there seems to be a display bug for comment creation time? On edit it says 20hrs (accurate), whereas viewing the comments otherwise shows that it was posted an hour ago. Not sure what's going on
So.. I don't know what you're talking about but I work in a corporate environment where we can't use JS but we can use SVG images... As a consequence I end up creating graphics in illustrator, exporting to SVG and then hand animating them with CSS animations.
I wouldn't recommend doing it my way, but for path animations they are likely animating the stroke length. Here is an example that might help, but use an animation tool if you can.
https://css-tricks.com/svg-line-animation-works/
One thing of note with stroke animations.. if you transition to/from negative numbers the animation breaks in Safari (negative numbers are out of spec aparently). There is a work around but I can't remember it at the moment, it results in the stroke animation playing in reverse though.
As mentioned above, if you can use a JS library, use one.
https://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/12/16/animated-map-path-fo... Not an exact match for your description, but in the same vein
Not animated or svg, but along the same lines, some years ago I wrote https://bazzargh.github.io/stripmap/ which automates generating stripmaps. The idea was to eventually use this for travelogues of my cycling trips; a map of the route would be a sidebar to the text.
Since then I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubins_path as a way to find the path segments; combined with Douglas-Puecker that's probably what I'd use today.
Tangentially interesting: while leveraging Perplexity to try and find the blog post in question this post and your StackOverflow question already pollute the results it draws from and causes it to abort any more detailed search for such a blog post. I find this mildly amusing.
I built something similar for my blog https://matall.in/posts/vietnam/
I didn't write a tutorial but you can check the code here https://github.com/matallo/matall.in
I have been working, slowly, toward a way to do something like this, for years. My latest attempt (http://alanbernstein.net/galleries/2020-pecos/) is not professional or polished, but it does work. IIRC it is canvas rather than SVG, and the "animation" is driven by the photo slideshow.
Tangentially, I find that the bulk of the work is in compiling and prepping the assets, including multiple camera devices, incorrect timestamps, buggy rotation exif data, captions from multiple sources, GPS tracks from multiple sources...
Thanks for asking here, I'm looking forward to finding a better way to do it.
Might not be what you're looking for, but about 2 years back now I built a little tool that does something similar to this (not SVG) and no special coding/skills required
Check out the sample story here: https://turas.app/s/japan-x-taiwan/BtEjycbA
As you scroll down past the days, it will show the map and places for each day (on desktop).
The front-end of this is a planning app for planning the itinerary and the "story" is one output of the planner.
Not quite what you're asking for, but there was this discussion and website that you'll hopefully find relevant:
I remember Google had a really cool tool based on their maps that could animate journeys. It was pretty good but I haven't heard about it for years. I don't even remember the name. Probably killed anyway, knowing Google.
Here’s one from a few months ago “HOW I ADDED MAPS TO MY TRAVEL POSTS”
Heh, i just asked deepseek for fun. It gave me python script that takes photos, uses exif coordinates and OSM. 15 minutes
Craig Mod's "Koya Bound" website has beautiful photos and custom SVG maps.
https://walkkumano.com/koyabound/
I thought this was so compelling that I ended up walking the trail myself. Incredible experience.