Simon Willison’s Weblog

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TILs

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TIL Converting Airtable JSON for use with sqlite-utils using jq — The Airtable API outputs JSON that looks like this:
29th Aug 2020, 4:04 am
TIL Browsing your local git checkout of homebrew-core — The [homebrew-core](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core) repository contains all of the default formulas for Homebrew.
28th Aug 2020, 12:39 am
TIL Piping echo to a file owned by root using sudo and tee — I wanted to create a file with a shell one-liner where the file lived somewhere owned by root.
25th Aug 2020, 12:30 am
TIL Rendering Markdown with the GitHub Markdown API — I wanted to convert the Markdown used in my TILs to HTML, using the exact same configuration as GitHub does. GitHub has a whole load of custom extensions for things like tables and syntax highlighting (see [issue 17](https://github.com/simonw/til/issues/17)).
23rd Aug 2020, 5:30 am
TIL Skipping a GitHub Actions step without failing — I wanted to have a GitHub Action step run that might fail, but if it failed the rest of the steps should still execute and the overall run should be treated as a success.
23rd Aug 2020, 3:23 am
TIL Creating a dynamic line chart with SVG — I helped build the tide chart visualizations for [Rocky Beaches](https://www.rockybeaches.com/).
22nd Aug 2020, 6:34 pm
TIL Providing a "subscribe in Google Calendar" link for an ics feed — If you provide your own custom generated ICS file hosted at a URL it's nice to be able to give Google Calendar users an easy way to subscribe to that feed.
22nd Aug 2020, 5:42 am
TIL Dynamically loading multiple assets with a callback — For [datasette-leaflet-geojson](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-leaflet-geojson) I wanted to dynamically load some external CSS and JavaScript and then execute some code once they had loaded ([issue 14](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-leaflet-geojson/issues/14)).
22nd Aug 2020, 4:23 am
TIL Outputting JSON with reduced floating point precision — [datasette-leaflet-geojson](github.com/simonw/datasette-leaflet-geojson) outputs GeoJSON geometries in HTML pages in a way that can be picked up by JavaScript and used to plot a Leaflet map.
22nd Aug 2020, 4:19 am
TIL Working around the size limit for nodeValue in the DOM — TIL that `nodeValue` in the DOM has a size limit!
21st Aug 2020, 11:13 pm
TIL Using grep to write tests in CI — GitHub Actions workflows fail if any of the steps executes something that returns a non-zero exit code.
20th Aug 2020, 4:26 am
TIL Finding the largest SQLite files on a Mac — This runs using Spotlight so it's really fast:
19th Aug 2020, 3:11 pm
TIL Programatically accessing Heroku PostgreSQL from GitHub Actions — My [db-to-sqlite](https://github.com/simonw/db-to-sqlite) tool can connect to a PostgreSQL database, export all of the content and write it to a SQLite database file on disk.
18th Aug 2020, 10:46 pm
TIL Read the Docs Search API — I stumbled across this API today: https://docs.datasette.io/_/api/v2/docsearch/?q=startup&project=datasette&version=stable&language=en
16th Aug 2020, 9:08 pm
TIL Code coverage using pytest and codecov.io — I got my [asgi-csrf](https://github.com/simonw/asgi-csrf) Python package up to 100% code coverage. Here's [the pull request](https://github.com/simonw/asgi-csrf/issues/13).
15th Aug 2020, 6:20 pm
TIL Pointing a custom subdomain at Read the Docs — I host the documentation for Datasette on [Read the Docs](https://readthedocs.org/). Until today it lived at https://datasette.readthedocs.io/ but today I moved it to a custom subdomain, https://docs.datasette.io/
14th Aug 2020, 9:12 pm
TIL Customizing my zsh prompt — I got fed up of the default macOS `zsh` prompt:
12th Aug 2020, 6:52 pm
TIL How to call pip programatically from Python — I needed this for the `datasette install` and `datasette uninstall` commands, see [issue #925](https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/925).
12th Aug 2020, 12:07 am
TIL Packaging a Python CLI tool for Homebrew — I finally figured out how to package [Datasette](https://github.com/simonw/datasette) for installation with Homebrew. My package was accepted into Homebrew core, which means you can now install it like this:
11th Aug 2020, 4:49 pm
TIL Attaching a bash shell to a running Docker container — Use `docker ps` to find the container ID:
10th Aug 2020, 3:41 pm
TIL Enabling WAL mode for SQLite database files — I was getting occasional `Error: database is locked` messages from a Datasette instance that was running against a bunch of different SQLite files that were updated by cron scripts (my personal [Dogsheep](https://dogsheep.github.io/)).
10th Aug 2020, 3:23 am
TIL How to deploy a folder with a Dockerfile to Cloud Run — I deployed https://metmusem.datasettes.com/ by creating a folder on my computer containing a Dockerfile and then shipping that folder up to Google Cloud Run.
5th Aug 2020, 3:36 am
TIL SQLite BLOB literals — I wanted to construct a string of SQL that would return a blob value:
29th Jul 2020, 9:49 pm
TIL PostgreSQL full-text search in the Django Admin — Django 3.1 introduces PostgreSQL `search_type="websearch"` - which gives you search with advanced operators like `"phrase search" -excluding`. James Turk [wrote about this here](https://jamesturk.net/posts/websearch-in-django-31/), and it's also in [my weeknotes](https://simonwillison.net/2020/Jul/23/datasette-copyable-datasette-insert-api/).
25th Jul 2020, 10:36 pm
TIL Implementing a "copy to clipboard" button — I had to figure this out while building [datasette-copyable](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-copyable/) - demo [here](https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid/ny_times_us_counties.copyable?state=Texas&county=Harris).
23rd Jul 2020, 9:21 pm
TIL Updating a Markdown table of contents with a GitHub Action — [markdown-toc](https://github.com/jonschlinkert/markdown-toc) is a Node script that parses a Markdown file and generates a table of contents for it, based on the headings.
22nd Jul 2020, 7:42 pm
TIL Registering temporary pluggy plugins inside tests — While implementing more finely-grained permissions for `datasette-insert-api` ([issue 8](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-insert-api/issues/8)) I decided I wanted to register a Datasette pluggy plugin for the duration of a single test.
21st Jul 2020, 4:21 pm
TIL Upgrading a Heroku PostgreSQL database with pg:copy — Figured this out in https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/issues/132 - I was running PostgreSQL 9.x and I wanted 11.x in order to use the new `search_type="websearch"` option in Django 3.1.
20th Jul 2020, 6:58 pm
TIL Password hashing in Python with pbkdf2 — I was researching password hashing for [datasette-auth-passwords](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-auth-passwords). I wanted very secure defaults that would work using the Python standard library without any extra dependencies.
14th Jul 2020, 3:53 am
TIL Using heroku pg:pull to restore a backup to a macOS laptop — Today I worked out how to use the Heroku `pg:pull` command and [Postgres.app](https://postgresapp.com/) to pull a Heroku backup to my laptop.
11th Jul 2020, 12:16 am

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