417 items tagged “datasette”
Datasette is an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.
2020
Weeknotes: datasette-auth-passwords, a Datasette logo and a whole lot more
All sorts of project updates this week.
[... 913 words]datasette-auth-passwords. My latest plugin: datasette-auth-passwords provides a mechanism for signing into Datasette using a username and password (which is verified in order to set a ds_actor authentication cookie). So far it only supports passwords that are hard-coded into Datasette’s configuration via environment variables, but I plan to add database-backed user accounts in the future.
Weeknotes: SBA Covid-19 PPP loans, Datasette talks, Datasette plugin upgrades
This week I’ve mainly been exploring Small Business Administration Covid-19 loans data, pitching some talks and upgrading some plugins for compatibility with Datasette 0.44+.
[... 524 words]sba-loans-covid-19-datasette (via) The treasury department released a bunch of data on the Covid-19 SBA Paycheck Protection Program Loan recipients today—I’ve loaded the most interesting data (the $150,000+ loans) into a Datasette instance.
Datasette 0.45: The annotated release notes
Datasette 0.45, out today, features magic parameters for canned queries, a log out feature, improved plugin documentation and four new plugin hooks.
[... 863 words]Weeknotes: cookiecutter templates, better plugin documentation, sqlite-generate
I spent this week spreading myself between a bunch of smaller projects, and finally getting familiar with cookiecutter. I wrote about my datasette-plugin cookiecutter template earlier in the week; here’s what else I’ve been working on.
[... 703 words]datasette-block-robots.
Another little Datasette plugin: this one adds a /robots.txt
page with Disallow: /
to block all indexing of a Datasette instance from respectable search engine crawlers. I built this in less than ten minutes from idea to deploy to PyPI thanks to the datasette-plugin cookiecutter template.
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!
[... 914 words]Weeknotes: Datasette alphas for testing new plugin hooks
A relatively quiet week this week, compared to last week’s massive push to ship Datasette 0.44 with authentication, permissions and writable canned queries. I can now ship alpha releases, such as today’s Datasette 0.45a1, which means I can preview new plugin features before they are completely ready and stable.
[... 728 words]Datasette: A Developer, a Shower and a Data-Inspired Moment (via) Matt Asay interviewed me over Zoom last month. This captures a lot of my thinking around open source really well: “Datasette is aggressively open source for a bunch of reasons. Most of them are very selfish reasons.”
How much can you learn from just two columns?
Derek Willis shared an intriguing dataset this morning: a table showing every Twitter account followed by an official GOP congressional Twitter account.
[... 951 words]Datasette 0.44: The annotated release notes
I just released Datasette 0.44 to PyPI. With 128 commits since 0.43 this is the biggest release in a long time—and likely the last major release of new features before Datasette 1.0.
[... 1,648 words]Weeknotes, I guess
What a week. Hard to work up the enthusiasm to write about what I’ve been working on.
[... 314 words]Weeknotes: Datasette 0.43
My main achievement this week was shipping Datasette 0.43, with a collection of smaller improvements and one big one: a redesign of the register_output_renderer
plugin hook.
Serving photos locally with datasette-media. datasette-media is a new Datasette plugin which can serve static files from disk in response to a configured SQL query that maps incoming URL parameters to a path to a file. I built it so I could run dogsheep-photos locally on my laptop and serve up thumbnails of images that match particular queries. I’ve added documentation to the dogsheep-photos README explaining how to use datasette-media, datasette-json-html and datasette-template-sql to create custom interfaces onto Apple Photos data on your machine.
Using SQL to Look Through All of Your iMessage Text Messages (via) Dan Kelch shows how to access the iMessage SQLite database at ~/Library/Messages/chat.db—it’s protected under macOS Catalina so you have to enable Full Disk Access in the privacy settings first. I usually use the macOS terminal app but I installed iTerm for this because I’d rather enable full disk access to a separate terminal program than let anything I’m running in my regular terminal take advantage of it. It worked! Now I can run “datasette ~/Library/Messages/chat.db” to browse my messages.
Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos
According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican:
[... 1,937 words]Weeknotes: Working on my screenplay
I’m taking an Introduction to Screenwriting course with Adam Tobin at Stanford, and my partial screenplay is due this week. I’m pulling together some scenes that tell the story of the Russian 1917 February Revolution and the fall of the Tsar through the lens of the craftsmen working on the Tsar’s last Fabergé egg. So I’ve not been spending much time on anything else.
[... 226 words]Datasette table diagram, now with a DOT graph (via) Thomas Ballinger shared a huge improvement to my Observable notebook for rendering a diagram of a collection of Datasette tables. He showed how to use the DOT language to render a full schema digram with arrows joining together the different tables. I’ve applied his changes to my notebook.
Weeknotes: Datasette 0.41, photos breakthroughs
Shorter weeknotes this week, because my main project for the week warrants a detailed write-up on its own (coming soon... update 21st May here it is).
[... 867 words]How to install and upgrade Datasette using pipx (via) I’ve been using pipx to run Datasette for a while now—it’s a neat Python packaging tool which installs a Python CLI command with all of its dependencies in its own isolated virtual environment. Today, thanks to Twitter, I figured out how to install and upgrade plugins in the same environment—so I added a section to the Datasette installation documentation about it.
github-to-sqlite 2.2 highlights thread. I released github-to-sqlite 2.2 today with a new “stargazers” command for importing users who have starred one or more specific repositories. This Twitter thread lists highlights of recent releases and links to a live Datasette demo that shows what the tool can do.
Weeknotes: Archiving coronavirus.data.gov.uk, custom pages and directory configuration in Datasette, photos-to-sqlite
I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.
[... 1,132 words]Weeknotes: Datasette 0.40, various projects, Dogsheep photos
A new release of Datasette, two new projects and progress towards a Dogsheep photos solution.
[... 826 words]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.
[... 1,100 words]Weeknotes: Hacking on 23 different projects
I wrote a lot of code this week: 184 commits over 23 repositories! I’ve also started falling for Zeit Now v2, having found workarounds for some of my biggest problems with it.
[... 901 words]Goodbye Zeit Now v1, hello datasette-publish-now—and talking to myself in GitHub issues
This week I’ve been mostly dealing with the finally announced shutdown of Zeit Now v1. And having long-winded conversations with myself in GitHub issues.
[... 2,050 words]Zeit Now v1 to sunset soon: no new deployments from 1st May, total shutdown 7th August. I posted a thread on Twitter with some thoughts. Zeit Now v1 remains the best hosting platform I’ve ever used given my particular tastes. They’ve handled the shutdown very responsibly, but I’m sad to see it go.
Weeknotes: Covid-19, First Python Notebook, more Dogsheep, Tailscale
My covid-19.datasettes.com project publishes information on COVID-19 cases around the world. The project started out using data from Johns Hopkins CSSE, but last week the New York Times started publishing high quality USA county- and state-level daily numbers to their own repository. Here’s the change that added the NY Times data.
[... 993 words]