Simon Willison’s Weblog

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372 items tagged “projects”

2022

Joining CSV files in your browser using Datasette Lite

I added a new feature to Datasette Lite—my version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (previously): you can now use it to load one or more CSV files by URL, and then run SQL queries against them—including joins across data from multiple files.

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A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps

Earlier today I found myself wanting to programmatically generate some images of maps.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview

I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.

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Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation

Hosting provider Fly released Fly Machines this week. I got an early preview and I’ve been working with it for a few days—it’s a fascinating new piece of technology. I’m using it to get my hosting service for Datasette ready for wider release.

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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

Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI

My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.

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Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser

Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite of useful extras.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What’s new in sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21: --lines, --text, --convert

sqlite-utils is my combined CLI tool and Python library for manipulating SQLite databases. Consider this the annotated release notes for sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21, both released in the past week.

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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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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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s3-credentials 0.8. The latest release of my s3-credentials CLI tool for creating S3 buckets with credentials to access them (with read-write, read-only or write-only policies) adds a new --public option for creating buckets that allow public access, such that anyone who knows a filename can download a file. The s3-credentials put-object command also now sets the appropriate Content-Type heading on the uploaded object. # 7th December 2021, 7:04 am

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: 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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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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s3-credentials: a tool for creating credentials for S3 buckets

I’ve built a command-line tool called s3-credentials to solve a problem that’s been frustrating me for ages: how to quickly and easily create AWS credentials (an access key and secret key) that have permission to read or write from just a single S3 bucket.

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Weeknotes: CDC vaccination history fixes, developing in GitHub Codespaces

I spent the last week mostly surrounded by boxes: we’re completing our move to the new place and life is mostly unpacking now. I did find some time to fix some issues with my CDC vaccination history Datasette instance though.

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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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Datasette Desktop 0.2.0: The annotated release notes

Datasette Desktop is a new macOS desktop application version of Datasette, an “open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data” built on top of SQLite. I released the first version last week—I’ve just released version 0.2.0 (and a 0.2.1 bug fix) with a whole bunch of critical improvements.

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Datasette Desktop—a macOS desktop application for Datasette

I just released version 0.1.0 of the new Datasette macOS desktop application, the first version that end-users can easily install. I would very much appreciate your help testing it out!

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Datasette Desktop 0.1.0 (via) This is the first installable version of the new Datasette Desktop macOS application I’ve been building. Please try it out and leave feedback on Twitter or on the GitHub Discussions thread linked from the release notes. # 8th September 2021, 5:14 am

Building a desktop application for Datasette (and weeknotes)

This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and running on their own personal computers.

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Apply conversion functions to data in SQLite columns with the sqlite-utils CLI tool

Earlier this week I released sqlite-utils 3.14 with a powerful new command-line tool: sqlite-utils convert, which applies a conversion function to data stored in a SQLite column.

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