Filling in gaps and reorganising what became unwieldy
Published on 7th November 2024 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutesThe travelogue has seen quite an amount of attention in the last few weeks. Firstly, a lot of content has been added or refreshed. Destination directories have become more informative articles, giving rise to new sections for Canada and the U.S.A. The former Alpine and Pyrenean article for Europe has been split up into its own section. Other sections have been renamed and many articles retitled.
The enabler for all this flurry of changes has been the advent of GenAI; it is now possible to automate a lot of the effort. It still needs human oversight and can be heavy work from time to time. As with human help, not every tool is as effective as one might like it to be. Getting to know such foibles is becoming essential for the world of work.
The gap filling also happened around here as well. Wherever there was a collation of websites, descriptions were added. In one case, a more narrative form was made from what was there; it is the outdoor pursuits inspiration piece that was progressed like that. In time, that may be the way that things go in other places, too. If you want to check what has happened, all the activity was in the resources section. The collations of long-distance trails and online retailers are among the beneficiaries.
While changes may have been dramatic thanks to new text processing technology, much remains unaltered. While the appearance may get attention sometime, that is not a priority for now. Trips remain human written anyway; the technology does not do all for us anyhow. You may have notes, but a machine can only do so much with them; it cannot carry over your personal touch that well or easily.
It all takes my back to university days, when a lecturer found regurgitated errors in someone else’s work. Then, the advice was to use the efforts of others for inspiration, not transcription. That remains ever more relevant in the times in which we now live. We need to learn how to use the new machines to help us, and that will be a longer process with its share of slips and trips before everything gets consolidated again.
There is more to the ongoing housekeeping efforts than the above. Commenting has been restricted on older posts, since they only attracted spam at that stage. Some design tweaks were needed to make this work.
Other inconsequential entries have been removed. This was in the early days when short announcements were common, mainly community news or site updates. These are not needed now on an entity that is nearly twenty years in operation, the blog, that is.
The pruning has continued. Dead links have been fixed or removed, and addressed changed in some places. Text has been refreshed, using GenAI to inspire any rewording.
Reading times are now added to every entry, so you can decide to read something right away or postpone it until you have more time. As they say, the choice is all yours.
You may notice some larger images with no copyright details added. Many of these have come from GenAI platforms like Ideogram, while others may have come via Unsplash. Photos of my own will continue to appear, too. It is not like the early days when there was a limited personal collection that computing needed to supplement. Still, some of the results from GenAI are impressive, and they add a certain something if used well.
Pages now get last update dates so you get to know what is the most current. The tweaks continue…
This is not the only place that I have been refreshing, for I also have West Limerick History on the go. This is where I have posted historical writings from my late father. After what felt like forever, I finally completed the set with a little help from GenAI. This year is becoming one where I have been laying many things to rest, clearing numerous backlogs in the process.
The evergreen content sections on the sidebar have had a refresh too, mainly to make the titles fresher and more informative. This does make things less friendly on the backend for me, but that is not your issue.
Longer articles on long-distance trails and other outdoor adventures have been split after realising how long they got; menus on the sidebar list all the sections so you can decide which to check out for yourself. Demanding about an hour of reading time seems too much. Everything now is less than 20 minutes at most, and many do not need more than 10 minutes.