narrowbotR

The narrowbotR¹ is a simple bot that posts locations on the Canal & River Trust (CRT) network in England and Wales to Mastdon and Bluesky, and previously on Twitter².

The narrowbotR is inspired by the (now archived) Londonmapbot, created by Matt Dray, which regularly posts to twitter a randomly selected location within the general area of Greater London. It posts the latitude and longitude, a link the location on Open Street Map and an aerial photo of the location provided by Mapbox. It has inspired a number of other similar twitter bots, the “mapbotverse”.

Having seen Matt’s efforts I thought up the narrowbotR during the Covid-19 pandemic when lockdowns and other restrictions meant I was unable to go on holiday and was particularly missing canal boat holidays. Upon discovering that the Canal and River Trust publish some of their geospatial information as open data, I realised there was a possibility to use the Londonmapbot’s approach to tweet canal related locations.

As an important resource for leisure, heritage and environmental protection many people find canals, their features, use and surroundings worthy of photographing. So in addition to using the CRT data as the location source, the narrowbotR also adapts the Londonmapbot’s approach to make a call to the Flickr API to search for photos taken near the location, falling back to a Mapbox aerial image if no photo is available. This functionality makes use of the ability in the Flickr API to search by location, and then uses an algorithm to score the photos and select a photo for inclusion in the post.

Originally developed for Twitter in October 2020², the narrowbotR has been posting on Mastodon since November 2022³ and Bluesky since late 2024.

You can read more about the original development of the narrowbotR and the migration to mastodon on my blog.