This is a map of trips I took during 2011, represented as great circle route lines. It was a fun experiment with a number of tools and technologies (and some code hacking adventures in which I'm pretty much out of my element, but made it work).
This originated in a Google Doc spreadsheet I've kept with data about my travels: driving vs. flying, origins, destinations, reasons for traveling, et cetera.
I generated a CSV file of visited cities and geocoded them, which is used to draw the point geometry on the map. The great circle lines started as a CSV file of origins and destinations that I processed through Dane Springmeyer's arc.js node module for outputting great circle routes, which resulted in the GeoJSON file you see on the map.
TileMill was used to build the map – showing blue lines for flights, orange lines for drives.
The map is hosted on my own TileStream server, and displayed on the web using Wax, Modest Maps and some Javascript code from Zac. QGIS was used for some data editing and processing, but not much.
The TileMill project files for the map are in the carto directory, if you want to see how the carto stylesheet is built. The source data is in the carto/data directory, too, but doesn't include the few 1:10m scale NaturalEarth boundary files used for coastline, country, and state borders.