Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged githubactions in 2022

Filters: Year: 2022 × githubactions × Sorted by date


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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Leveraging ’shot-scraper’ and creating image diffs. Üllar Seerme has a neat recipe for using shot-scraper and ImageMagick to create differential animations showing how a scraped web page has visually changed. # 24th October 2022, 9:34 pm

How to create a Python package in 2022 (via) Fantastic tutorial on modern Python packaging by Rodrigo Girão Serrão. I’ve been meaning to figure out Poetry for a while now and this gave me exactly the information I needed to start figuring it out. Great coverage of GitHub Actions, Tox and pre-commit as well. # 15th October 2022, 10:10 pm

Automating screenshots for the Datasette documentation using shot-scraper

I released shot-scraper back in March as a tool for keeping screenshots in documentation up-to-date.

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Software engineering practices

Gergely Orosz started a Twitter conversation asking about recommended “software engineering practices” for development teams.

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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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upptime (via) “Open-source uptime monitor and status page, powered entirely by GitHub Actions, Issues, and Pages.” This is a very creative (ab)use of GitHub Actions: it runs a scheduled action to check the availability of sites that you specify, records the results in a YAML file (with the commit history tracking them over time) and can automatically open a GitHub issue for you if it detects a new incident. # 26th May 2022, 3:53 am

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

Supercharging GitHub Actions with Job Summaries (via) GitHub Actions workflows can now generate a rendered Markdown summary of, well, anything that you can think to generate as part of the workflow execution. I particularly like the way this is designed: they provide a filename in a $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY environment variable which you can then append data to from each of your steps. # 16th May 2022, 11:02 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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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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@newshomepages (via) Ben Welsh used my shot-scraper tool and GitHub Actions to launch a Twitter bot which tweets screenshots of newspaper homepages on a scheduled basis. Ben says: “The tech is so easy, I was able to pull it off in a couple hours at zero cost. A decade ago I ran a similar project using the cloud resources of the day. [...] It costs thousands of dollars and the screenshots were of much lower quality. Incredible progress!” # 12th March 2022, 7:21 pm

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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