March 2022
March 4, 2022
Working with the web platform is dealing with history, with the accumulated matter of quirksmode and good-enough standards. In exchange for the ability to deliver instantly-updating software directly to customers with no middlemen and no installation, you have to absorb a great deal of nearly-useless information that’s entirely about dodging meaningless traps.
March 5, 2022
Why I invented “dash encoding”, a new encoding scheme for URL paths
Datasette now includes its own custom string encoding scheme, which I’ve called dash encoding. I really didn’t want to have to invent something new here, but unfortunately I think this is the best solution to my very particular problem. Some notes on how dash encoding works and why I created it.
[... 1,392 words]March 8, 2022
lite-youtube-embed (via) Handy Web Component wrapper around the standard YouTube iframe embed which knocks over 500KB of JavaScript off the initial page load—I just added this to the datasette.io homepage and increased the Lighthouse performance score from 51 to 93!
March 9, 2022
Postgres Auditing in 150 lines of SQL (via) I’ve run up against the problem of tracking changes made to rows within a database table so many times, and I still don’t have a preferred solution. This approach to it looks very neat: it uses PostgreSQL triggers to populate a single audit table (as opposed to one audit table per tracked table) and records the previous and current column values for the row using jsonb.
March 10, 2022
shot-scraper: automated screenshots for documentation, built on Playwright
shot-scraper is a new tool that I’ve built to help automate the process of keeping screenshots up-to-date in my documentation. It also doubles as a scraping tool—hence the name—which I picked as a complement to my git scraping and help scraping techniques.
[... 1,802 words]curlconverter.com (via) This is pretty magic: paste in a “curl” command (including the ones you get from browser devtools using copy-as-curl) and this will convert that into code for making the same HTTP request... using Python, JavaScript, PHP, R, Go, Rust, Elixir, Java, MATLAB, Ansible URI, Strest, Dart or JSON.
March 12, 2022
Weeknotes: Distracted by Playwright
My goal for this week was to unblock progress on Datasette by finally finishing the dash encoding implementation I described last week. I was getting close, and then I got very distracted by Playwright.
[... 892 words]@newshomepages (via) Ben Welsh used my shot-scraper tool and GitHub Actions to launch a Twitter bot which tweets screenshots of newspaper homepages on a scheduled basis. Ben says: “The tech is so easy, I was able to pull it off in a couple hours at zero cost. A decade ago I ran a similar project using the cloud resources of the day. [...] It costs thousands of dollars and the screenshots were of much lower quality. Incredible progress!”
March 14, 2022
Scraping web pages from the command line with shot-scraper
I’ve added a powerful new capability to my shot-scraper command line browser automation tool: you can now use it to load a web page in a headless browser, execute JavaScript to extract information and return that information back to the terminal as JSON.
[... 1,277 words]Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page
I just released shot-scraper-template, a GitHub repository template that helps you start taking automated screenshots of a web page by filling out a form.
[... 1,177 words]March 15, 2022
Contributing to Complex Projects (via) Mitchell Hashimoto describes in detail his process for understanding and eventually contributing to a complex new codebase. I picked up a whole bunch of useful tips from this.
Bugs in Hello World. If a Unix program attempts to send its standard output to /dev/full it should return an error code. Many classic “hello world” programs fail to correctly handle this case.
typesplainer (via) A Python module that produces human-readable English descriptions of Python type definitions—also available as a web interface.
March 17, 2022
Deno by example (via) Interesting approach to documentation: a big list of annotated examples illustrating the Deno way of solving a bunch of common problems.
March 19, 2022
Weeknotes: Tildes not dashes, and the big refactor
After last week’s shot-scraper distractions with Playwright, this week I finally managed to make some concrete progress on the path towards Datasette 1.0.
[... 1,292 words]March 23, 2022
SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite
Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.
[... 1,998 words]March 24, 2022
Datasette 0.61: The annotated release notes
I released Datasette 0.61 this morning—closely followed by 0.61.1 to fix a minor bug. Here are the annotated release notes.
[... 1,465 words]DAOs are, I think, one of the best illustrations of the problem with a lot of these Web3 projects: They are trying to find technological solutions that will somehow codify very complex social structures. A lot of them also seem to operate under the assumption that everyone is acting in good faith, and that project members’ interests will generally align—a baffling assumption given the amount of bad actors in the crypto space.
geoBoundaries. This looks useful: “The world’s largest open, free and research-ready database of political administrative boundaries.” Founded by the geoLab at William & Mary university, and released under a Creative Commons Attribution license that includes a requirement for a citation. File formats offered include shapefiles, GeoJSON and TopoJSON.
March 28, 2022
Weeknotes: datasette-auth0
Datasette 0.61, a Twitter Space and a new Datasette plugin for authenticating against Auth0.
[... 957 words]March 29, 2022
WebAssembly in my Browser Desktop Environment (via) Dustin Brett built the WebAssembly demo to end all WebAssembly demos: his daedalOS browser desktop environment simulates a Windows-style operating system, and bundles WebAssembly projects that include v86 for 486 emulation, js-dos for DOS emulation to run Doom, BoxedWine to run Wine applications like Notepad++, Ruffle to emulate Flash, ffmpeg.wasm to power audio and video conversion, WASM-ImageMagick for image conversion, Pyodide for a Python shell and more besides that!