Ask HN: Do you know travel blogs that have animated SVG maps of their travels?
60 comments
·February 4, 2025peterldowns
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.
lbebber
Oh, this was based off of a project I made for Codrops[1]. Let me know if you'd like some help or input!
CharlesW
That and your other projects at lbebber.github.io/public are stellar, Lucas!
lbebber
Thank you, glad you like it!
trebeljahr
+1 to this!
What great work :)
whycome
Is there something like this that uses KMZ waypoints to craft the map/animation?
cmod
Thank you for building this; over the years the bus animation has gone a bit wonky, but otherwise the page holds up really well. It’s a great library you built.
lbebber
Beautiful work! I thought the bus was a fun goofy touch on its first appearance hahah
peterldowns
I didn't realize you were the original programmer on this — amazing work!
lbebber
Thank you! I both programmed and designed this--I miss doing this kind of work.
neuraldenis
Amazing project, love it!
exabrial
This is the first time for me where a website hijacked the scroll wheel, and it's actually _really really_ well done. This is amazing. Thanks for posting it.
daemonologist
The key is that it doesn't actually hijack the scroll wheel - the main content (header and text and photos on the left) all scrolls normally, controlled by the browser. The map just monitors the scroll position and element client rects and runs its own non-blocking visualization on the side.
I agree - beautifully implemented, and great content too.
kyleblarson
Doing a temple stay at Koyasan is by far my favorite lifetime travel experience.
trebeljahr
what made it so special?
bpev
Fyi for those who tap in and see the map in the background instead of to the right of the content, the layout/treatment feels pretty different for desktop vs mobile.
trebeljahr
This is soooo cool! It is not the blog I was searching for but wow :) Thanks for sharing it.
wahnfrieden
His newer Iseji one is nice too
benabbott
This is really well done.
nicwolff
That's just terrific!
rvrs
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
mtmail
There's something called a second-chance queue for overlooked submissions https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (listed on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)
Some older users (I think YC alumni) can nominate articles and moderators give them a boost. The timestamp doesn't change, I've seen 2 day old articles appearing. It's a bit confusing, I think it was hacked in years ago but works good enough.
PStamatiou
That's my site! I did it for quite a few photosets, like this one https://photos.paulstamatiou.com/africa/southern-serengeti-t...
Surprised it still mostly works fine many years later
slopdo
I'm not able to find the post that OP refers to about how you animated the SVGs. Maybe you could share the link? Thanks!
trebeljahr
thanks for the great work :)
trebeljahr
daaaamn!
That's the one :) Thank you so much for finding it!
yapyap
I also see it as posted an hour ago, and see the original thread post as 2 hours ago.
Odd.
illwrks
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.
trebeljahr
nice, thanks for the article. Never seen this trick before but it looks super neat.
What sort of JS library would you recommend for a similar effect to this? PixiJs, D3, Paper, P5.js, good old vanilla canvas?
illwrks
It depends on what your overall goal is. GSAP is a great but I’m not sure it’s suitable for SVG as it’s been a long time since I’ve used it.
If you have access to creative tools like illustrator and after effects then perhaps Lottie.
There are other tools on my radar but I’ve never used them SVGGator
sflanker
https://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/12/16/animated-map-path-fo... Not an exact match for your description, but in the same vein
lbebber
Oh, I made this! (almost a decade ago, huh)
trebeljahr
this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while and I'll take inspiration from the article.
Also, funny how in the blog post it says the Github will come soon and now almost a decade later there is still no Github link :)
bazzargh
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.
sflanker
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.
datadrivenangel
Like when my googling solutions to a niche data integration interaction between two tools resulted in a first page result for one of my coworker's linkedin posts asking if anyone in her network knew the answer... The internet is shallow sometimes.
jachee
This is Dead Internet theory in action.
trebeljahr
have you seen the Freya Holmer video on generative AI as a parasitic cancer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-opBifFfsMY
Also I love how the internet is "dead", yet here we are, on a website with a bunch of humans providing soooo much value that at least corners of the internet still seem very much alive.
I wish there were more sites like HN.
throwaway519
haha, I just asked ChatGPT and it references this HN post.
It's a small world.
trebeljahr
whut?! this is unreal.
1wheel
trebeljahr
this is super cool! Do you know how they achieve this effect?
matallo
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
alanbernstein
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.
wonder_er
This is a cool project!
I tried to do something similar using the Strava API. Never could get precise-enough lat and long to place them nicely on a map.
Some of my wild amount of data is visible here:
https://joshs-mobility-data-54dab943ebba.herokuapp.com/?zoom...
alanbernstein
Cool. Looks like your tracks are lined up with streets, what's the precision problem?
wonder_er
I cannot get lat/long for the photos. Strava obv stores it bc they render the images with pins showing exactly where the photo was taken.
I could only put the photos at like the very beginning of the route or randomly distribute them along the route.
I prob could/should do that. It would be vastly more information than I currently present on the map
null
CharlieDigital
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.
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.