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.
https://walkkumano.com/koyabound/
I thought this was so compelling that I ended up walking the trail myself. Incredible experience.
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
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.
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.
I didn't write a tutorial but you can check the code here https://github.com/matallo/matall.in
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.
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.