Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in Mar, 2022

Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2022 × Month: Mar × Sorted by date


Weeknotes: datasette-auth0

Datasette 0.61, a Twitter Space and a new Datasette plugin for authenticating against Auth0.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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