Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged projects in 2020

Filters: Year: 2020 × projects × Sorted by date


Building a search engine for datasette.io

This week I added a search engine to datasette.io, using the search indexing tool I’ve been building for Dogsheep.

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datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette

This week I launched datasette.io—the new official project website for Datasette.

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datasette.io (via) Datasette finally has an official project website, three years after the first release of the software. I built it using Datasette, with custom templates to define the various pages. The site includes news, latest releases, example sites and a new searchable plugin directory. # 11th December 2020, 4:11 am

Weeknotes: github-to-sqlite workflows, datasette-ripgrep enhancements, Datasette 0.52

This week: Improvements to datasette-ripgrep, github-to-sqlite and datasette-graphql, plus Datasette 0.52 and a flurry of dot-releases.

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Datasette 0.52. A relatively small release—it has a new plugin hook (database_actions(), for adding links to a new database actions menu), renames the --config option to --setting and adds a new “datasette publish cloudrun --apt-get-install” option. # 29th November 2020, 12:56 am

datasette-ripgrep: deploy a regular expression search engine for your source code

This week I built datasette-ripgrep—a web application for running regular expression searches against source code, built on top of the amazing ripgrep command-line tool.

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Weeknotes: datasette-indieauth, datasette-graphql, PyCon Argentina

Last week’s weeknotes took the form of my Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data talk write-up, which represented most of what I got done that week. This week I mainly worked on datasette-indieauth, but I also gave a keynote at PyCon Argentina and released a version of datasette-graphql with a small security fix.

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datasette-graphql 1.2 (via) A new release of the datasette-graphql plugin, fixing a minor security flaw: previous versions of the plugin could expose the schema (but not the actual data) of tables in databases that were otherwise protected by Datasette’s permission system. # 21st November 2020, 10:21 pm

Security vulnerability in datasette-indieauth: Implementation trusts the “me” field returned by the authorization server without verifying it. I spotted a critical security vulnerability in my new datasette-indieauth plugin: it accepted the “me” profile URL value returned from the authorization server in the final step of the IndieAuth flow without verifying it, which means a malicious server could imitate any user. I’ve shipped 1.1 with a fix and posted a security advisory to the GitHub repository. # 19th November 2020, 9:14 pm

Implementing IndieAuth for Datasette

IndieAuth is a spiritual successor to OpenID, developed and maintained by the IndieWeb community and based on OAuth 2. This weekend I attended IndieWebCamp East Coast and was inspired to try my hand at an implementation. datasette-indieauth is the result, a new plugin which enables IndieAuth logins to a Datasette instance.

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Datasette 0.51 (plus weeknotes)

I shipped Datasette 0.51 today, with a new visual design, plugin hooks for adding navigation options, better handling of binary data, URL building utility methods and better support for running Datasette behind a proxy. It’s a lot of stuff! Here are the annotated release notes.

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Weeknotes: incremental improvements

I’ve been writing my talk for PyCon Argentina this week, which has proved surprisingly time consuming. I hope to have that wrapped up soon—I’m pre-recording it, which it turns out is much more work than preparing a talk to stream live.

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Weeknotes: evernote-to-sqlite, Datasette Weekly, scrapers, csv-diff, sqlite-utils

This week I built evernote-to-sqlite (see Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter), launched the Datasette Weekly newsletter, worked on some scrapers and pushed out some small improvements to several other projects.

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Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter

I’ve been using Evernote for over a decade, and I’ve long wanted to export my data from it so I can do interesting things with it.

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xml-analyser. In building evernote-to-sqlite I dusted off an ancient (2009) project I built that scans through an XML file and provides a summary of what elements are present in the document and how they relate to each other. I’ve now packaged it up as a CLI app and published it on PyPI. # 12th October 2020, 12:41 am

evernote-to-sqlite (via) The latest tool in my Dogsheep series of utilities for personal analytics: evernote-to-sqlite takes Evernote note exports en their ENEX XML format and loads them into a SQLite database. Embedded images are loaded into a BLOB column and the output of their cloud-based OCR system is added to a full-text search index. Notes have a latitude and longitude which means you can visualize your notes on a map using Datasette and datasette-cluster-map. # 12th October 2020, 12:38 am

Datasette Weekly: Datasette 0.50, git scraping, extracting columns (via) The first edition of the new Datasette Weekly newsletter—covering Datasette 0.50, Git scraping, extracting columns with sqlite-utils and featuring datasette-graphql as the first “plugin of the week” # 10th October 2020, 9 pm

Datasette Weekly (via) I’m trying something new: I’ve decided to start an email newsletter called the Datasette Weekly (I’m already worried I’ll regret that weekly promise) which will share news about Datasette and the Datasette ecosystem, plus tips and tricks for getting the most out of Datasette and SQLite. # 10th October 2020, 7:05 pm

Datasette 0.50: The annotated release notes

I released Datasette 0.50 this morning, with a new user-facing column actions menu feature and a way for plugins to make internal HTTP requests to consume the JSON API of their parent Datasette instance.

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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: Datasette column actions, plus three new plugins

A renewed emphasis on building out Datasette Cloud has produced three new plugins this week: datasette-dateutil, datasette-import-table and datasette-edit-schema, plus a major improvement to Datasette’s default interface for browsing tables.

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datasette-dateutil (via) New Datasette plugin exposing date/time parsing custom SQL functions powered by the classic dateutil Python library. # 28th September 2020, 12:33 am

Weeknotes: software carpentry, compiling modules for SQLite

This week I completed the Software Carpentry instructor training course, added two foundational features to sqlite-utils and learned how to compile modules for SQLite.

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Refactoring databases with sqlite-utils extract

Yesterday I described the new sqlite-utils transform mechanism for applying SQLite table transformations that go beyond those supported by ALTER TABLE. The other new feature in sqlite-utils 2.20 builds on that capability to allow you to refactor a database table by extracting columns into separate tables. I’ve called it sqlite-utils extract.

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Executing advanced ALTER TABLE operations in SQLite

SQLite’s ALTER TABLE has some significant limitations: it can’t drop columns (UPDATE: that was fixed in SQLite 3.35.0 in March 2021), it can’t alter NOT NULL status, it can’t change column types. Since I spend a lot of time with SQLite these days I’ve written some code to fix this—both from Python and as a command-line utility.

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Weeknotes: datasette-seaborn, fivethirtyeight-polls

This week I released Datasette 0.49 and tinkered with datasette-seaborn, dogsheep-beta and polling data from FiveThirtyEight.

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Datasette 0.49: The annotated release notes

Datasette 0.49 is out. Some notes on what’s new.

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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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Render Markdown tool (via) I wrote a quick JavaScript tool for rendering Markdown via the GitHub Markdown API—which includes all of their clever extensions like tables and syntax highlighting—and then stripping out some extraneous HTML to give me back the format I like using for my blog posts. # 3rd September 2020, 12:08 am

airtable-export. I wrote a command-line utility for exporting data from Airtable and dumping it to disk as YAML, JSON or newline delimited JSON files. This means you can backup an Airtable database from a GitHub Action and get a commit history of changes made to your data. # 29th August 2020, 9:48 pm