Simon Willison’s Weblog

JSON Escape Text. I built a tiny tool for turning text into an escaped JSON string—I needed it to help create descriptions and canned SQL queries for adding to Datasette’s metadata.json files. # 25th April 2018, 4:13 am

Datasette ClusterMap Plugin – Querying UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) Food Hygiene Ratings Open Data (via) Tony Hirst wrote a tutorial on using datasette-cluster-map to analyze food hygiene ratings data from the FSA # 20th April 2018, 8:50 pm

Datasette 0.19: Plugins Documentation (via) I’ve released the first preview of Datasette’s new plugin support, which uses the pluggy package originally developed for py.test. So far the only two plugin hooks are for SQLite connection creation (allowing custom SQL functions to be registered) and Jinja2 template environment initialization (for custom template tags), but this release is mainly about exercising the plugin registration mechanism and starting to gather feedback. Lots more to come. # 17th April 2018, 3:59 am

Datasette 0.18: units (via) This release features the first Datasette feature that was entirely designed and implemented by someone else (yay open source)—Russ Garrett wanted unit support (Hz, ft etc) for his Wireless Telegraphy Register project. It’s a really neat implementation: you can tell Datasette what units are in use for a particular database column and it will display the correct SI symbols on the page. Specifying units also enables unit-aware filtering: if Datasette knows that a column is measured in meters you can now query it for all rows that are less than 50 feet for example. # 14th April 2018, 3:56 pm

Wireless Telegraphy Register (via) Russ Garrett used Datasette to build a browsable interface to the UK’s register of business radio licenses, using data from Ofcom. # 12th April 2018, 4:08 pm

Datasette 0.15: sort by column (via) I’ve released the latest version of Datasette to PyPI. The key new feature is the ability to sort tables by column, using clickable column headers or directly via the new _sort= and _sort_desc= querystring parameters. # 9th April 2018, 5:25 pm

Baltimore Sun Public Salary Records (via) The Baltimore Sun have published an interactive search engine for public salaries of Maryland state employees, and it’s powered by Datasette! Since data journalism is one of my key use-cases for Datasette I’m incredibly excited to see this in the wild. They’ve also published the underlying source code (see the via link) which is a really nice example of how to use Datasette’s custom templates and canned query functionality. # 28th March 2018, 5:12 pm

Cloud-first: Rapid webapp deployment using containers (via) The Research Software Engineering group at ICL have written a tutorial on deploying web apps as Docker containers using Azure and they use Datasette as the example application. # 28th March 2018, 3:50 pm

Observable notebook: San Francisco trees from Datasette. I used an Observable notebook to rebuild my San Francisco tree search demo against a Datasette API of a CSV of trees published by the SF Department of Public Works. The map updates live as you type a query, and every cell can be toggled to view the underlying source code. # 1st February 2018, 12:37 am

How to turn a list of JSON objects into a Datasette. ramadis on GitHub cleaned up data on 184,879 crimes reported in Buenos Aires since 2016 and shared them on GitHub as a JSON file. Here are my notes on how to use Pandas to convert JSON into SQLite and publish it using Datasette. # 20th January 2018, 1:07 am

How to compile and run the SQLite JSON1 extension on OS X. Thanks, Stack Overflow! I’ve been battling this one for a while—it turns out you can download the SQLite source bundle, compile just the json1.c file using gcc and load that extension in Python’s sqlite3 module (or with Datasette’s --load-extension= option) to gain access to the full suite of SQLite JSON functions—json(), json_extract() etc. # 10th January 2018, 9:01 pm

csvkit. “A suite of command-line tools for converting to and working with CSV”—includes a huge range of utilities for things like converting Excel and JSON to CSV, grepping, sorting and extracting a subset of columns, combining multiple CSV files together and exporting CSV to a relational database. Worth reading through the tutorial which shows how the different commands can be piped together. # 8th January 2018, 9:03 pm

Himalayan Database: From Visual FoxPro GUI to JSON API with Datasette (via) The Himalayan Database is a compilation of records for all expeditions that have climbed in the Nepalese Himalaya, originally compiled by journalist Elizabeth Hawley over several decades. The database is published as a Visual FoxPro database—here Raffaele Messuti‏ provides step-by-step instructions for extracting the data from the published archive, converting them to CSV using dbfcsv and then converting the CSVs to SQLite using csvs-to-sqlite so you can browse them using Datasette. # 8th January 2018, 7:26 pm

VICE News Police Shootings in Datasette (via) VICE News collected data on both fatal and nonfatal police shootings from the 50 largest local police departments in the United States. They released the data under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so I’ve converted it to SQLite and loaded it into Datasette. # 11th December 2017, 10:47 pm

Datasette 0.14: customization edition. I just released the latest version of Datasette with a strong theme of customization: Datasette now supports custom templates and CSS styling hooks, and the metadata format has been expanded to allow per-database and per-table source/license/description information. You can also now define named canned queries which will be packaged up with your data. # 10th December 2017, 1:55 am

Datasette: Ability to customize presentation of specific columns in HTML view. Still a work in progress, but Datasette master now allows you to inject links to one or more additional CSS and JavaScript resources (optionally with SRI hashes) which will be included on every page. Each template also
now provides CSS classes on the body element derived from the current database and table names to provide hooks for custom styling. Next up: custom template support. # 30th November 2017, 7:27 am

Publishing the Lahman Baseball Database with Datasette (via) Ted Lawless used Datasette to publish an API for the Lahman Baseball Database—a dataset of players and teams spanning 1871 to 2016, available under a Creative Commons License. # 20th November 2017, 9:15 pm

Datasette 0.12. I just released v0.12 of Datasette. The most exciting new feature is the ability to display a UI for editing named parameters—so you can construct an arbitrarily complex SQL query, include some named parameters and then link directly to it in Datasette to provide a simple interface for changing those parameters. An example involving Australian dogs is included in the release notes. # 16th November 2017, 3:55 pm

Plotly Falcon SQL Client and the Remarkable Datasette SQLite2API Generator. Lovely write-up of Datasette by Tony Hirst. I’m particularly excited about its applications in the world of data journalism so it’s great to see it starting to get attention from people in that sphere. # 16th November 2017, 3:04 am

Datasettes · simonw/datasette. I’m collecting examples of datasette-powered APIs on the project wiki. # 14th November 2017, 7:39 am

Datasette for Polar Bears. I found a fun dataset of Polar Bear ear tag tracking data put out by the USGS Alaska Science Center and deployed it using datasette in just a couple of minutes—here’s how I did it. # 14th November 2017, 5:41 am