Simon Willison’s Weblog

A very experimental alpha plugin which lets you do this:

datasette tailscale mydata.db \
  --ts-authkey tskey-auth-xxxx --ts-hostname datasette-preview

This starts a localhost Datasette server with a Tailscale sidecar that connects it to your Tailnet, such that http://datasette-preview/ serves Datasette.

It's using the Python bindings for the experimental tailscale-rs library. I filed an issue asking if there's a cleaner way of setting up the proxy mechanism.

Quoting the release notes:

The big feature in this alpha is tools to insert, edit and delete rows within the Datasette interface. These features are available on table pages, and edit and delete are also available as action items on the row page.

The inspiration for this feature - which is long overdue - was Datasette Agent. I added SQL write support to that the other day which highlighted how absurd it was that you could insert and edit ties via the chat interface but not in the regular Datasette UI!

A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup:

<click-to-play>
  <a href="URL to GIF">
    <img src="URL to first frame" alt="...">
  </a>
</click-to-play>

Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on demand. For when you don't want big GIFs to be loaded unless people want to play them.

Here's an example that demonstrates the new row editing tools in Datasette - in fact I built this Web Component for that post.

This release expands datasette-acl from table-only permissions toward a general resource-sharing system.

Alex Garcia did most of the work for this release - we're fleshing out the plugin that will allow multi-user Datasette instances finely grained control over who can access which resources within Datasette.