Say It With Flowers: BouqAIs with the Tussie-Mussie Generator

#ai #gemini #astro #vue

The Tussie-Mussie Generator is a web app for anyone who wants to send a meaningful floral e-card with an AI-generated "tussie mussie", a type of small nosegay. It uses the Victorian language of flowers to compose a bouquet, generates an image with Gemini, and sends it via Resend. This post covers
a Mother's Day relaunch: fixing a broken email integration and swapping the AI image model.

What changed in this relaunch

Migrated email sending from Mailgun to Resend, including a Cloudflare serverless function
Fixed DNS configuration across Porkbun, Netlify, and Resend for a custom subdomain
Replaced the previous image generator with Gemini for accurate tussie mussie generation
Refactored the UI with Astro + Vue and impeccable.style for AI-assisted critique

Have you ever wanted to build an e-card system that would allow you to send little ai-generated bouquets to your friends? No? Yes? Read on, gentle reader!

Last year, I onboarded to my new job by building this sample app that lets you use the Victorian language of flowers to compose a bouquet. An image-heavy app like this is a great candidate for hosting and optimizing via Cloudinary, so all the flower images are stored there. An image of the composed bouquet is generated by Gemini, and then sent via Resend to the recipient of your choice. The app looks like this:

and the generated e-card looks like this:

I launched this app a year ago, and it's had an interesting lifespan. I wanted to relaunch it for Mother's Day and realized there was some refactoring to do!

Here are a few of the gotchas I dealt with:

Keeping the core: The basis of this app is its dataset, which I created a while ago on Kaggle as a useful version of the Victorian "Language of Flowers", scraped from the Farmer's Almanac. Here's an example of what that looks like:

If your idea is centered around a solid dataset, you can't go wrong. Once I had the list, it took me a while to scrape images of the flowers in question and store them, optimized, on Cloudinary. But that work was done a year ago. So two things remained for the relaunch: refactoring the UI and fixing the bits that stopped working, namely the e-card generator.

Refactoring the UI

This app is built using my preferred stack, namely Astro + Vue. After a year, it was definitely time to upgrade, including fixing the tailwind integration which relied on an outdated package. Cursor made short work of that - it's one of the best uses of AI software agents.

Tip: periodically ask your AI to plan the removal of any redundant files or code while you complete refactors. There are usually vestiges that can be deleted.

I used a wildly useful AI skill to refactor my admittedly basic UI: impeccable.style. Install these skills on your machine and as you work with any AI generated UI suggestions, run /impeccable critique to reality-check your work for taste and style. I'm now using impeccable on all my UIs - it also helped me tidy my portfolio. The UI went from this:

...to the UI shown above. I like it a lot.

Fixing the E-Card functionality

This app caused me a horrible panic after launch last year, ruining an anniversary dinner, due to a kerfuffle with Mailgun, the original e-card sending mechanism. I was shocked by an enormous overage charge due to hacking of their systems, and I shut the entire thing down as fast as I could. To relaunch, I needed to find a new service to send email via API. Once again, Cursor to the rescue.

Enter Resend, a new email service that is much more solid than my previous choice. Let us hope that we have smooth sailing from now on! The integration includes a serverless function that you can host on Cloudflare, and works well as soon as you verify a domain. That last part took me the longest time - the gotcha is that since I bought the domain on Porkbun, I had to edit DNS records there to serve emails from a subdomain. The site is hosted on Netlify, so I had to build the subdomain there, and then the DNS verified on Resend. It's the kind of task that you don't do often, so it's easy to miss a step. But all is set now, and the emails are sending!

I also had to reconsider how to build the AI generated bouquets. I'm out of credits on the service I previously chose to generate the bouquets, and they were never quite right anyway (generated as standard bouquets rather than true tussie mussies which have a silver filigree holder). It's crazy to see how AI has evolved for this esoteric imagery over the past year - now Gemini can accurately compose a tussie mussie in its holder, given a specific prompt.

Enjoy these little bouquets! Send one to your Mom today!