Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged projects, githubactions

Filters: projects × githubactions × Sorted by date


Publish Python packages to PyPI with a python-lib cookiecutter template and GitHub Actions

I use cookiecutter to start almost all of my Python projects. It helps me quickly generate a skeleton of a project with my preferred directory structure and configured tools.

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Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks

Mastodon is definitely having a moment. User growth is skyrocketing as more and more people migrate over from Twitter.

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A tool to run caption extraction against online videos using Whisper and GitHub Issues/Actions

I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online videos.

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simonw/datasette-screenshots (via) I started a new GitHub repository to automate taking screenshots of Datasette for marketing purposes, using my shot-scraper browser automation tool. # 17th May 2022, 5:56 pm

Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes

I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.

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Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)

I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.

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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.

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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.

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Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git

I’ve been experimenting with a new variant of Git scraping this week which I’m calling Help scraping. The key idea is to track changes made to CLI tools over time by recording the output of their --help commands in a Git repository.

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Datasette Desktop—a macOS desktop application for Datasette

I just released version 0.1.0 of the new Datasette macOS desktop application, the first version that end-users can easily install. I would very much appreciate your help testing it out!

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Django SQL Dashboard 1.0

Earlier this week I released Django SQL Dashboard 1.0. I also just released 1.0.1, with a bug fix for PostgreSQL 10 contributed by Ryan Cheley.

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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.

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Weeknotes: airtable-export, generating screenshots in GitHub Actions, Dogsheep!

This week I figured out how to populate Datasette from Airtable, wrote code to generate social media preview card page screenshots using Puppeteer, and made a big breakthrough with my Dogsheep project.

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California Protected Areas Database in Datasette (via) I built this yesterday: it’s a Datasette interface on top of the CPAD 2020 GIS database of protected areas in California maintained by GreenInfo Network. This was a useful excuse to build a GitHub Actions flow that builds a SpatiaLite database using my shapefile-to-sqlite tool, and I fixed a few bugs in my datasette-leaflet-geojson plugin as well. # 21st August 2020, 11:15 pm

Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub

GitHub quietly released a new feature at some point in the past few days: profile READMEs. Create a repository with the same name as your GitHub account (in my case that’s github.com/simonw/simonw), add a README.md to it and GitHub will render the contents at the top of your personal profile page—for me that’s github.com/simonw

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A cookiecutter template for writing Datasette plugins

Datasette’s plugin system is one of the most interesting parts of the entire project. As I explained to Matt Asay in this interview, the great thing about plugins is that Datasette can gain new functionality overnight without me even having to review a pull request. I just need to get more people to write them!

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Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs

I’ve started tracking TILs—Today I Learneds—inspired by this five-year-and-counting collection by Josh Branchaud on GitHub (found via Hacker News). I’m keeping mine in GitHub too, and using GitHub Actions to automatically generate an index page README in the repository and a SQLite-backed search engine.

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datasette-clone

I released a fun little Datasette utility today: datasette-clone.

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Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run

I’m using the combination of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Run to retrieve data from the U.S. Department of Justice FARA website and deploy it as a queryable API using Datasette.

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