Simon Willison’s Weblog

Weeknotes: Mostly messing around with map tiles

7th February 2021

Most of what I worked on this week was covered in Serving map tiles from SQLite with MBTiles and datasette-tiles. I built two new plugins: datasette-tiles for serving map tiles, and datasette-basemap which bundles map tiles for zoom levels 0-6 of OpenStreetMap. I also released download-tiles for downloading tiles and bundling them into an MBTiles database.

sqlite-utils 3.4.1

I added one new feature to sqlite-utils: the sqlite-utils import command can now be configured to read CSV files using alternative delimiters, by passing the --delimiter option or the --quotechar option.

This is covered in the documentation, which provides the following example:

name;description
Cleo;|Very fine; a friendly dog|
Pancakes;A local corgi

Imported using:

sqlite-utils insert dogs.db dogs dogs.csv \
  --delimiter=";" --quotechar="|"

Datasette 0.54.1

I spotted a subtle but nasty regression in Datasette: a change I made to how hidden form fields worked on the table page meant that clearing the _search search input and re-submitting the form didn’t take effect, and the search would persist. Datasette 0.54.1 fixes that bug.

Releases this week

• datasette-jellyfish: 1.0.1—2021-02-06
  Datasette plugin adding SQL functions for fuzzy text matching powered by Jellyfish
• sqlite-utils: 3.4.1—2021-02-06
  Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
• datasette-tiles: 0.5—2021-02-04
  Mapping tile server for Datasette, serving tiles from MBTiles packages
• download-tiles: 0.4—2021-02-03
  Download map tiles and store them in an MBTiles database
• datasette-basemap: 0.2—2021-02-02
  A basemap for Datasette and datasette-leaflet
• datasette: 0.54.1—2021-02-02
  An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
• datasette-cluster-map: 0.17.1—2021-02-01
  Datasette plugin that shows a map for any data with latitude/longitude columns
• datasette-leaflet: 0.2.2—2021-02-01
  Datasette plugin adding the Leaflet JavaScript library

TIL this week

• Splitting on commas in SQLite
• Serving MBTiles with datasette-media
• Downloading MapZen elevation tiles