Aotearoa, Again
I’ve always liked historical photography, especially when it shows places I know in a different light: a rural stretch before the motorway went through, or the harbour bridge half-built. I created Aotearoa,deliberately Again to share that interest with others.
Every morning (New Zealand time) the site publishes one photograph from the Alexander Turnbull Library, harvested via DigitalNZ. Plates are fetched and AI-colourised ahead of time. I review and schedule them into a runway of upcoming editions (same idea as Buffer), so publish morning is automatic. From there each edition goes out to the web, an Atom feed, a Buttondown newsletter, and social channels. The originals stay in the archive. The site is another way into that history, not a replacement for it.
Colours are interpretive, not documentary. The about page is honest about that, and every edition links back to the library record with rights and attribution. I care about respecting the original creators and the library’s terms of use.
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The daily edition
The public page stays quiet on purpose: just the title, caption, plate details, rights, and a compare slider. I wanted people to be able to drag between the greyscale original and the colourised plate, not only see the colourised version. Sliding back and forth is a good way to sit with the history of the image and notice what the colourisation changes.
How it runs
What I wanted was a publishing machine that didn’t feel like a research demo. I picked a stack that is boring on purpose: Rails 8, SQLite, Solid Queue/Cache/Cable, Active Storage on disk, libvips for stills, ffmpeg for vertical share video. It runs at home behind a Cloudflare Tunnel.
Every candidate plate is sourced from DigitalNZ with rights that permit reuse (including commercial use when social uploads need it). I generate variants with preferred RubyLLM/OpenRouter models, but nothing gets scheduled until I’ve reviewed and approved it for the runway. One plate a day keeps colourisation cost and post volume reasonable.
When an edition publishes, channel jobs fire for Buttondown email, Instagram (feed + reel), Facebook Page, YouTube Shorts, and Bluesky. Bluesky posts include Standard.site document and publication records so the link card gets publication branding instead of a bare domain preview. Other social networks use Open Graph tags as usual.
Branded stills and 9:16 video are composed once, then reused across Meta, YouTube, OG tags, and the Atom enclosure. That keeps captions and image URLs stable for clients that won’t follow signed blob URLs.
Admin is small on purpose, not a full CMS: HTTP Basic, candidates, preferred models, and the editions schedule. The point is to queue editions and resubmit images until I’ve got a result I’m happy to ship.
I wanted something I’d still be happy running in a year: something I’d be an enthusiastic user of, honest about what AI gets wrong, and cheap enough that keeping it online isn’t a project in its own right.
If this project interests you, or you have feedback, get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.