October 2020
75 posts: 7 entries, 16 links, 6 quotes, 46 beats
Oct. 1, 2020
Oct. 2, 2020
Weeknotes: Datasette column actions, plus three new plugins
A renewed emphasis on building out Datasette Cloud has produced three new plugins this week: datasette-dateutil, datasette-import-table and datasette-edit-schema, plus a major improvement to Datasette’s default interface for browsing tables.
[... 1,093 words]Oct. 4, 2020
Potential new elevator pitch / tagline for Datasette: The best way to publish data online (via) One of the biggest challenges I’ve had with Datasette is compressing it into a single elevator pitch or tagline that helps answer the question “what does this software do?”—the project does a lot of different things, so finding the right angle for explaining it has proved really difficult. I’m workshopping a new tagline over on the Datasette discussion forum—feedback, suggestions and challenges very welcome!
Oct. 5, 2020
I’ve often joked with other internet culture reporters about what I call the “normie tipping point.” In every emerging internet trend, there is a point at which “normies” — people who don’t spend all day online, and whose brains aren’t rotted by internet garbage — start calling, texting and emailing us to ask what’s going on. Why are kids eating Tide Pods? What is the Momo Challenge? Who is Logan Paul, and why did he film himself with a dead body?
The normie tipping point is a joke, but it speaks to one of the thorniest questions in modern journalism, specifically on this beat: When does the benefit of informing people about an emerging piece of misinformation outweigh the possible harms?
Oct. 6, 2020
Oct. 7, 2020
Running Datasette on DigitalOcean App Platform (via) I spent some time with DigitalOcean’s new App Platform today, which is a Heroku-style PaaS that starts at $5/month. It looks like it could be a really good fit for Datasette. Disk is ephemeral, but if you’re publishing read-only data that doesn’t matter since you can build the SQLite database as part of the deployment and bundle it up in the Docker/Kubernetes container.
Bedrock: The SQLitening (via) Back in March 2018 www.mozilla.org switched over to running on Django using SQLite! They’re using the same pattern I’ve been exploring with Datasette: their SQLite database is treated as a read-only cache by their frontend servers, and a new SQLite database is built by a separate process and fetched onto the frontend machines every five minutes by a scheduled task. They have a healthcheck page which shows the latest version of the database and when it was fetched, and even lets you download the 25MB SQLite database directly (I’ve been exploring it using Datasette).
Oct. 9, 2020
Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository
Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it.
[... 963 words]Datasette 0.50: The annotated release notes
I released Datasette 0.50 this morning, with a new user-facing column actions menu feature and a way for plugins to make internal HTTP requests to consume the JSON API of their parent Datasette instance.
[... 792 words]Animating a commit based Sudoku game using Puppeteer (via) This is really clever. There’s a GitHub repo that tracks progress in a game of Sudoku: Anish Karandikar wrote code which iterates through the game board state commit by commit, uses that state to generate an HTML table, passes that table to Puppeteer using a data: URI, renders a PNG of each stage and then concatenates those PNGs together into an animated GIF using the gifencoder Node.js library.
Oct. 10, 2020
Weeknotes: Mainly Datasette 0.50
Most of what I’ve been up to this week is covered in Datasette 0.50: The annotated release notes and Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository.
[... 196 words]Datasette Weekly (via) I’m trying something new: I’ve decided to start an email newsletter called the Datasette Weekly (I’m already worried I’ll regret that weekly promise) which will share news about Datasette and the Datasette ecosystem, plus tips and tricks for getting the most out of Datasette and SQLite.
Datasette Weekly: Datasette 0.50, git scraping, extracting columns (via) The first edition of the new Datasette Weekly newsletter—covering Datasette 0.50, Git scraping, extracting columns with sqlite-utils and featuring datasette-graphql as the first “plugin of the week”
It’s probably a bad idea to risk paying your ransom, though — the US Treasury Dept has issued clarifying guidance that companies paying off ransomware, and all companies facilitating the payment, can be charged with sanctions violations if the bitcoins end up at North Korea or sanctioned cybercrime groups.