Simon Willison’s Weblog

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393 items tagged “datasette”

2022

Datasette for geospatial analysis (via) I added a new page to the Datasette website describing how Datasette can be used for geospatial analysis, pulling together several of the relevant plugins and tools from the Datasette ecosystem. # 13th April 2022, 12:48 am

Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards

This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.

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datasette-dashboards (via) Romain Clement’s datasette-dashboards plugin lets you configure dashboards for Datasette using YAML, combining markdown blocks, Vega graphs and single number metrics using a layout powered by CSS grids. This is a beautiful piece of software design, with a very compelling live demo. # 7th April 2022, 6:36 pm

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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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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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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Weeknotes: Datasette Tutorials

I published two new tutorials for Datasette this week, both focused at end-users of the web application.

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Google Drive to SQLite

I released a new tool this week: google-drive-to-sqlite. It’s a CLI utility for fetching metadata about files in your Google Drive and writing them to a local SQLite database.

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Using SQLite and Datasette with Fly Volumes

A few weeks ago, Fly announced Free Postgres Databases as part of the free tier of their hosting product. Their announcement included this snippet:

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Datasette table diagram using Mermaid (via) Mermaid is a DSL for generating diagrams from plain text, designed to be embedded in Markdown. GitHub just added support for Mermaid to their Markdown pipeline, which inspired me to try it out. Here’s an Observable Notebook I built which uses Mermaid to visualize the relationships between Datasette tables based on their foreign keys. # 14th February 2022, 7:43 pm

Weeknotes: python_requires, documentation SEO

Fixed Datasette on Python 3.6 for the last time. Worked on documentation infrastructure improvements. Spent some time with Fly Volumes.

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Weeknotes: s3-credentials prefix and Datasette 0.60

A new release of s3-credentials with support for restricting access to keys that start with a prefix, Datasette 0.60 and a write-up of my process for shipping a feature.

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Datasette 0.60: The annotated release notes

I released Datasette 0.60 today. It’s a big release, incorporating 61 commits and 18 issues. Here are the annotated release notes.

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2021

Weeknotes: datasette-tiddlywiki, filters_from_request

I made some good progress on the big refactor this week, including extracting some core logic out into a new Datasette plugin hook. I also got distracted by TiddlyWiki and released a new Datasette plugin that lets you run TiddlyWiki inside Datasette.

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Weeknotes: Trapped in an eternal refactor

I’m still working on refactoring Datasette’s table view. In doing so I spun out a new plugin, datasette-pretty-traces, which improves Datasette’s tooling for seeing the SQL that was executed to build a specific page.

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Weeknotes: git-history, bug magnets and s3-credentials --public

I’ve stopped considering my projects “shipped” until I’ve written a proper blog entry about them, so yesterday I finally shipped git-history, coinciding with the release of version 0.6—a full 27 days after the first 0.1.

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git-history: a tool for analyzing scraped data collected using Git and SQLite

I described Git scraping last year: a technique for writing scrapers where you periodically snapshot a source of data to a Git repository in order to record changes to that source over time.

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Weeknotes: Shaving some beautiful yaks

I’ve been mostly shaving yaks this week—two in particular: the Datasette table refactor and the next release of git-history. I also built and released my first Web Component!

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Weeknotes: Apache proxies in Docker containers, refactoring Datasette

Updates to six major projects this week, plus finally some concrete progress towards Datasette 1.0.

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Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

My main project this week was a 90 minute workshop I delivered about Git scraping at Coda.Br 2021, a Brazilian data journalism conference, on Friday. This inspired the creation of a brand new tool, git-history, plus smaller improvements to a range of other projects.

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Datasette is four years old today. I marked the occasion with a short Twitter thread about the project so far. # 13th November 2021, 6:14 pm

AWS IAM definitions in Datasette (via) As part of my ongoing quest to conquer IAM permissions, I built myself a Datasette instance that lets me run queries against all 10,441 permissions across 280 AWS services. It’s deployed by a build script running in GitHub Actions which downloads a 8.9MB JSON file from the Salesforce policy_sentry repository—policy_sentry itself creates that JSON file by running an HTML scraper against the official AWS documentation! # 6th November 2021, 3:47 am

Weeknotes: datasette-jupyterlite, s3-credentials and a Python packaging talk

My big project this week was s3-credentials, described yesterday—but I also put together a fun expermiental Datasette plugin bundling JupyterLite and wrote up my PyGotham talk on Python packaging.

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Weeknotes: Learning Kubernetes, learning Web Components

I’ve been mainly climbing the learning curve for Kubernetes and Web Components this week. I also released Datasette 0.59.1 with Python 3.10 compatibility and an updated Docker image.

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Datasette 0.59: The annotated release notes

Datasette 0.59 is out, with a miscellaneous grab-bag of improvements. Here are the annotated release notes.

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Where does all the effort go? Looking at Python core developer activity (via) Łukasz Langa used Datasette to explore 28,780 pull requests made to the CPython GitHub repository, using some custom Python scripts (and sqlite-utils) to load in the data. # 18th October 2021, 8:21 pm

Weeknotes number 100

This entry marks my 100th weeknotes, which I’ve managed to post once a week (plus or minus a few days) consistently since 13th September 2019.

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