Major new product in the Nelsonsphere: my travel postcards. Our
recent cruise
to Italy, France, and Spain is a good example to start with. I plan
to keep updating this going forward.
I collected social media posts for 41 different trips I’ve taken in
the last fifteen years. I think of each post as a postcard: a little
thought in the moment, hopefully an image. When collected each thread
becomes a diary of a trip and the collection as a whole is a summary of
much of the travel Ken and I have done. It’s a lot, some 1900
photographs!
I started tweeting travelogues back in 2009 or so but only got
intentional about these as a sort of diary a few years ago. So the newer
ones are better written.
I’ve got technical notes on
how I built this using AI coding. It’s pretty straightforward with the
recent Mastodon threads, it’s basically just a thread unroller. But for
older posts I had to do some heroics with heuristics to identify travel
tweets. And lots of image recovery involving using the Wayback machine
and Flickr and Google Photos archives to find my originals. I might have
managed the basic unroller on my own but I never would have done all the
archive retrieval without an AI’s help.
