35 items tagged “natalie-downe”
2020
Weeknotes: Rocky Beaches, Datasette 0.48, a commit history of my database
This week I helped Natalie launch Rocky Beaches, shipped Datasette 0.48 and several releases of datasette-graphql, upgraded the CSRF protection for datasette-upload-csvs and figured out how to get a commit log of changes to my blog by backing up its database to a GitHub repository.
Weeknotes: Datasette alphas for testing new plugin hooks
A relatively quiet week this week, compared to last week’s massive push to ship Datasette 0.44 with authentication, permissions and writable canned queries. I can now ship alpha releases, such as today’s Datasette 0.45a1, which means I can preview new plugin features before they are completely ready and stable.
[... 728 words]Happy Birthday Sea Lions! (via) Today, June 15th, is Sea Lion birthday—half of all California Sea Lions are born today thanks to clever co-ordinated delayed implantation by Sea Lion females. Natalie has started making nature videos and I’ve been tagging along as her camera-person—this three minute video, shot at Pier 39 in San Francisco, celebrates Sea Lion birthday and explains how it works.
2018
Develop Your Naturalist Superpowers with Observable Notebooks and iNaturalist (via) Natalie’s article for this year’s 24 ways advent calendar shows how you can use Observable notebooks to quickly build interactive visualizations against web APIs. She uses the iNaturalist API to show species of Nudibranchs that you might see in a given month, plus a Vega-powered graph of sightings over the course of the year. This really inspired me to think harder about how I can use Observable to solve some of my API debugging needs, and I’ve already spun up a couple of private Notebooks to exercise new APIs that I’m building at work. It’s a huge productivity boost.
owlsnearme source code on GitHub. Here’s the source code for our new owlsnearme.com project. It’s a single-page React application that pulls all of its data from the iNaturalist API. We built it this weekend with the SuperbOwl kick-off as a hard deadline so it’s not the most beautiful React code, but it’s a nice demonstration of how React (and create-react-app in particular) can be used for rapid development.
Owls Near Me. Back in 2010 Natalie and I shipped owlsnearyou.com—a website for finding your nearest owls, using data from the sadly deceased WildlifeNearYou (RIP). To celebrate #SuperbOwl Sunday we rebuilt the same concept on top of the excellent iNaturalist API. Search for a place to see which owls have been spotted there, or click the magic button to geolocate your device and see which owls have been spotted in your nearby area!
2010
Getting married and going travelling
It’s been a busy month. On Saturday the 5th of June I married the wonderful Natalie Downe in a beautiful ceremony at Roedean School in Brighton. The reception had owls, cheese, a ferret, a golden eagle, amazing Turkish food, Jewish chair dancing and lovely guests. It was the happiest day of my life.
[... 342 words]2009
Going Nuts with CSS Transitions. Nat’s article for this year’s 24ways—adding special effects to images using CSS rotation, box shadows and the magical -webkit-transition property.
Styling buttons to look like links. Nat has a neat trick for styling submit buttons to look like regular links—so there’s absolutely no excuse for using a “delete” link when you should be using a POST request.
TiddlyPocketBook. Paul Downey took Nat’s dinky pocketbooks CSS and combined it with TiddlyWiki to create a single page pocketbook editor.
Dinky pocketbooks with WebKit transforms. Nat used 90 degree CSS transform rotations in print stylesheets for WebKit and Safari to create printable cut-out-and-fold pocketbooks from A4 pages. Very neat.
Practical, maintainable CSS (via) Nat’s posted slides and a video from her latest talk at last week’s Brighton Girl Geeks evening.
2008
Tweetersation. Nat and my latest side project: a JSONP API powered tool to more easily follow conversations between people on Twitter, by combining their tweets in to a single timeline.
CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS. Nat has published the slides and notes from her BarCamp presentation this morning. I’m really excited about her approach, which involves designing a “CSS system” of markup patterns and CSS that embodies the design of an individual site. Future maintenance can then take this overall system in to account, which is assisted by a defined ordering system and shared vocabulary.
addSizes.js: Snazzy automatic link file-size generation. Posted to Nat’s snazzy new blog: a script that uses my json-head API to grab the file size of linked documents on a page and insert those sizes in to the document.
Django People
I’m constantly surprised by the number of people I run in to at conferences (or even in one case on the train) who are using Django but are completely invisible to the Django community. It seems that this is the downside of having good documentation: many people just read it and start building, without ever showing their face on the mailing lists or IRC.
[... 194 words]Poorly Macbook, ineffective error message design. Nat’s MacBook died the other day, throwing out some impressively meaningless error symbols. How exactly are you meant to Google for a circle with a line through it?
2007
Back To The Future of Print. Nat’s contribution to 24 ways: a long needed update on the state of the art in print stylesheets.
Brighton geek venues. Nat’s latest project: a neat Google Maps mashup listing venues for geek events in Brighton, managed using Google MyMaps to edit a KML file.
Twitter / Natalie: Its announced and official... We’re both moving to Brighton in September.
Lithuania 2007 set on a Map. Nat has painstakingly geotagged 285 photos from our trip to Lithuania.
Natalie Downe: Lithuania 07. Nat’s been blogging our adventures in Lithuania.
oxfordgeeks.net
Nat and I had a bit of a mini-hackday this bank holiday Monday. Nat’s been doing a great job summoning local geeks out of the woodwork with Oxford Geek Nights event, but it’s still pretty hard to find other interesting events in the Oxfordshire area. It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s just that the geek community in Oxford is currently pretty fragmented.
[... 295 words]Talks for Oxford Geek Nights announced. Microslots on Yahoo! Pipes, Semantic Mediawiki, Second Life and more.
Oxford Geek Night 2
If you missed the last Oxford Geek Night, you really owe it to yourself to make it to the next one. If you were there then you shouldn’t need any convincing.
[... 180 words]Hacking del.icio.us with Python. Nat introduces snaflr, a Python script for republishing selected links from a number of del.icio.us users to one communal account.
Oxford Geeks hit the media! Coverage in the local newspaper and on the radio, with MP3s.
A Gathering Of Geeks. The Oxford Mail’s coverage of Nat’s Oxford Geek Night event.
First Oxford Geek Night a success! It really was the best evening geek event I’ve been to in a very long time.
2006
Del.icio.us fun with automated links. Nat’s documented one of del.icio.us’ least promoted features—the ability to auto-post your links to your weblog once a day.