Updates to the SFO Museum shoebox

It is now possible to add individual flights and Instagram posts, in addition to collection objects, to your shoebox. The goal is to slowly (and then quickly) add the ability to save any of the “first class actors” involved with the SFO Museum websites to your shoebox: Twitter posts, individual terminals and gates, airlines, aircraft and airports. Anything, really. Flights and Instagram posts are just what we’ve started with and what we’re using to make sure everything works.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on December 05, 2024 and tagged shoebox, flightdata, instagram and socialmedia.

Updates to the SFO Museum ActivityPub services

The ability for SFO Museum ActivityPub accounts to both signal and promote one another provides a mechanism where people can subscribe to a single (SFO Museum) account can keep up with everything that all the other (SFO Museum) accounts are talking about. The introduction of a message processing queue, currently just to handle nearby requests, opens up a whole world of possible interactions between people inside (and outside) the terminals and everything SFO Museum has to offer. These small incremental changes and small and incremental in keeping with our goal “to keep things simple and prove that everything can work in a low-cost serverless environment without the need for a lot of babysitting”.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 12, 2024 and tagged activitypub, socialmedia and golang.

Small focused tools for visualizing geographic data

This is a blog post about a series of small, purpose-fit web applications that can be run from your local desktop (or a remote server, if necessary) to visualize geographic data in a map. The first application lets you visualize GeoJSON files, the second SQLite databases containing MBTiles data and the third GeoParquet files. These are tools which were written to address specific use cases for SFO Museum but are sufficiently generalized, even though they each only try to do one thing well, that we are sharing them in the spirit of generosity.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 02, 2024 and tagged maps, geo, geojson, mbtiles, geoparquet and golang.

Holding Hands with the “Fediverse” – ActivityPub at SFO Museum

SFO Museum has joined the “Fediverse”. We have begun to operate a series of automated “bot” accounts that are published using the ActivityPub protocols which can be subscribed to from any client, like Mastodon, that supports those standards. These are automated, low-frequency, accounts and they currently only support a limited set of interactions: Accounts can be followed or unfollowed, individual posts can be “liked”, “boosted” or replied to but those replies will not be answered (yet) or published on the SFO Museum websites. To get started we’ve created three “groups” of accounts: Things which have happened recently involving the SFO Museum Aviation Collection; Things which have happened in the terminals (new and old) and; Things from the collection which are related to flights in and out of SFO.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on March 12, 2024 and tagged collection, activitypub, socialmedia and golang.

The SFO Museum Aviation Collection Website Shoebox

This is a blog post about something that’s been hiding in plain sight on the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website for over a month now: The ability to save collection objects to a personal “shoebox”. If that sounds like a simple bookmarking system limited to items in the SFO Museum collection that’s because it is. For now. The shoebox and the introduction of user accounts are the first steps, the first building blocks, towards developing more sophisticated functionality and applications for the museum and its collection.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on January 22, 2024 and tagged collection and shoebox.