Simon Willison’s Weblog

Weeknotes: Working on my screenplay

14th May 2020

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.

Some brief bullet points for this week’s software projects:

• Released version 0.1 of datasette-media, a new plugin that allows Datasette to serve files from disk based on executing a SQL query to find the file to return. I’m building it to help make photos-to-sqlite more immediately useful.
• Released Datasette 0.42 with improved (and now documented) internal methods to allow plugins to execute read-only SQL queries. I needed these for datasette-media.
• Released sqlite-utils 2.9 with new CLI commands sqlite-utils drop-table and sqlite-utils drop-view.
• Released sqlite-utils 2.9.1 with a tiny cosmetic improvement: the PyPI project page now shows project links! See this TIL for details.

I’ve also started adding changelog badges to various projects, showing the latest release version according to GitHub and linking to that project’s changelog. Datasette, photos-to-sqlite, sqlite-utils all have these now.

TIL this week

• Build the official Python documentation locally
• Converting HTML and rich-text to Markdown
• Adding project links to PyPI