Simon Willison’s Weblog

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431 posts tagged “datasette”

Datasette is an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.

2020

Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos

Visit 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:

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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.

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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.

# 8th May 2020, 3:23 am / observable, datasette, visualization

Weeknotes: Datasette 0.41, photos breakthroughs

Visit 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).

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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.

# 4th May 2020, 7:23 pm / datasette, pip, python

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.

# 2nd May 2020, 10:16 pm / projects, dogsheep, datasette, github

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.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.40, various projects, Dogsheep photos

A new release of Datasette, two new projects and progress towards a Dogsheep photos solution.

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

Visit 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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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.

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datasette-clone

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

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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.

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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.

# 4th April 2020, 5:32 am / zeit-now, hosting, datasette

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.

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Making Datasets Fly with Datasette and Fly (via) It’s always exciting to see a Datasette tutorial that wasn’t written by me! This one is great—it shows how to load Central Park Squirrel Census data into a SQLite database, explore it with Datasette and then publish it to the Fly hosting platform using datasette-publish-fly and datasette-cluster-map.

# 26th March 2020, 11:56 pm / tutorials, datasette, fly

Weeknotes: Datasette 0.39 and many other projects

This week’s theme: Well, I’m not going anywhere. So a ton of progress to report on various projects.

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datasette-publish-fly (via) Fly is a neat new Docker hosting provider with a very tempting pricing model: Just $2.67/month for their smallest always-on instance, and they give each user $10/month in free credit. datasette-publish-fly is the first plugin I’ve written using the publish_subcommand plugin hook, which allows extra hosting providers to be added as publish targets. Install the plugin and you can run “datasette publish fly data.db” to deploy SQLite databases to your Fly account.

# 19th March 2020, 3:40 am / docker, projects, hosting, datasette, fly

Weeknotes: COVID-19 numbers in Datasette

Visit Weeknotes: COVID-19 numbers in Datasette

COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, gets more terrifying every day. Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) have been collating data about the spread of the disease and publishing it as CSV files on GitHub.

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datasette-search-all: a new plugin for searching multiple Datasette tables at once

I just released a new plugin for Datasette, and it’s pretty fun. datasette-search-all is a plugin written mostly in JavaScript that executes the same search query against every searchable table in every database connected to your Datasette instance.

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Weeknotes: datasette-ics, datasette-upload-csvs, datasette-configure-fts, asgi-csrf

I’ve been preparing for the NICAR 2020 Data Journalism conference this week which has lead me into a flurry of activity across a plethora of different projects and plugins.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Writes

As discussed previously, the biggest hole in Datasette’s feature set at the moment involves writing to the database.

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How to cheat at unit tests with pytest and Black

I’ve been making a lot of progress on Datasette Cloud this week. As an application that provides private hosted Datasette instances (initially targeted at data journalists and newsrooms) the majority of the code I’ve written deals with permissions: allowing people to form teams, invite team members, promote and demote team administrators and suchlike.

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Weeknotes: Shaving yaks for Datasette Cloud

I’ve been shaving a lot of yaks, but I’m finally ready to for other people to start kicking the tires on the MVP of Datasette Cloud.

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Weeknotes: datasette-auth-existing-cookies and datasette-sentry

Work on Datasette Cloud continues—I’m tantalizingly close to having a MVP I can start to invite people to try out.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud and zero downtime deployments

Yesterday’s piece on Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run was originally intended to be my weeknotes, but ended up getting a bit too involved.

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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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Building a sitemap.xml with a one-off Datasette plugin

Visit Building a sitemap.xml with a one-off Datasette plugin

One of the fun things about launching a new website is re-learning what it takes to promote a website from scratch on the modern web. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using Niche Museums as an excuse to explore 2020-era SEO.

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2019

Weeknotes: Datasette 0.33

I released Datasette 0.33 yesterday. The release represents an accumulation of small changes and features since Datasette 0.32 back in November. Duplicating the release notes:

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Building tools to bring data-driven reporting to more newsrooms. I wrote about my fellowship project so far and my goals for the next few months for the JSK Medium publication. My next priority: an invite-only hosted version for newsrooms so that figuring out how to install and manage the software isn’t the biggest barrier to entry.

# 20th December 2019, 11:17 am / jsk, data-journalism, datasette

Logging to SQLite using ASGI middleware

I had some fun playing around with ASGI middleware and logging during our flight back to England for the holidays.

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