121 posts tagged “plugins”
2020
Weeknotes: Datasette Writes
As discussed previously, the biggest hole in Datasette’s feature set at the moment involves writing to the database.
[... 604 words]Building a sitemap.xml with a one-off Datasette plugin
One of the fun things about launching a new website is re-learning what it takes to promote a website from scratch on the modern web. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using Niche Museums as an excuse to explore 2020-era SEO.
[... 1,078 words]2018
Datasette: publish_subcommand hook + default plugins mechanism, used for publish heroku/now (via) I just landed a new plugin hook to Datasette master: publish_subcommand, which lets you define new publisher subcommands for the “datasette publish” CLI tool in addition to Heroku and Zeit Now. As part of this I’ve refactored the heroku/now publisher implementations into two default plugins that ship as part of Datasette—I hope to use this pattern for other core functionality in the future.
datasette-vega (via) I wrote a visualization plugin for Datasette that uses the excellent Vega “visualization grammar” library to provide bar, line and scatter charts configurable against any Datasette table or SQL query.
Datasette plugins, and building a clustered map visualization
Datasette now supports plugins!
[... 751 words]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.
2010
Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery. I’m using this jQuery plugin to save some bandwidth when people first view my Redis tutorial slides. It unobtrusively replaces images on a page with a placeholder graphic, then sets them to load automatically as the user scrolls down the page.
2009
qTip. Advanced tooltip plugin for jQuery, including borders and pointers created using CSS. Very flexible (we used this for the latest MP expenses application) but a little on the heavy side, weighing in at 38KB when minified.
tipsy. Simple Facebook-style tooltip plugin for jQuery.
Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.
I think you overstate the usefulness of the [jQuery Rules] plugin. Using this plugin, users are now limited by what selectors that can use (they can only use what the browsers provide - and are at the mercy of the cross-browser bugs that are there) which is a huge problem. Not to mention that it encourages the un-separation of markup/css/js.
jQuery.Rule (via) jQuery plugin for manipulating stylesheet rules. For me, this is the single most important piece of functionality currently missing from the core jQuery API. The ability to add new CSS rules makes an excellent complement to the .live() method added in jQuery 1.3.
Open in Browser Firefox Add-on (via) Solves the “application/json wants to download” problem, among others.
2008
jQuery history plugin. I used this plugin to add back button support to a small Ajax app today, with great results. I tried it a while ago and it didn’t work in Safari, but someone has updated it since and now it works perfectly.
Obscure bugs revisited: IE, HTTPS and plugins. Filed for future reference: IE breaks mysteriously if you serve it up plugin content (e.g. Flash) over HTTPS with a no-cache header—it deletes the file from cache before the plugin software gets a chance to open it.
jQuery.ScrollTo (via) Neat jQuery plugin for animated scrolling of both windows and overflow elements.
.first() and .last() methods for jQuery. I got fed up of expecting these to exist, so I wrote them as a couple of one-liner plugins.
2007
Reinteract—Better interactive Python. Really neat Mathematica-style pygtk interactive prompt for Python, where previous lines can be edited in place and graphs and other graphical primitives can be displayed inline. Includes an elegant plugin mechanism.
identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin.
Live Query jQuery plugin. Ingenious plugin that lets you register jQuery event bindings to be executed when a new element matching the provided selector is added to the DOM. Performance is kept snappy by only running the check after a jQuery DOM manipulation method has been executed (append, prepend, attr etc); it won’t notice elements added using regular DOM methods.
VeriSign’s SeatBelt OpenID plugin for Firefox. The first good example of browser integration for OpenID. It catches phishing attempts by watching out for rogue OpenID consumers that don’t redirect to the right place.
jQuery for JavaScript programmers
When jQuery came out back in January 2006, my first impression was that it was a cute hack. Basing everything around CSS selectors was a neat idea (see getElementsBySelector) but the chaining stuff looked like a bit of a gimmick and the library as a whole didn’t look like it would cover all of the bases. I wrote jQuery off as a passing fad.
[... 2,608 words]Background Iframe (bgiframe). jQuery plugin that inserts an iframe shim behind an element in IE, allowing the element to be positioned overlapping a select box without the select box showing through.
Bazaar/Avahi mDNS Plugin. Adds ZeroConf support to Bazaar, so you can “bzr share” a branch over the local network and “bzr browse” to discover shared branches. Designed for sprints with a local network but no internet access.
jQuery Taconite Plugin. Lets you serialize jQuery DOM manipulation commands as an XML document for retrieval via Ajax.
jQuery plugin: Validation. Pretty clever way of attacking the client-side form validation problem; supports both configuration object literals and custom attributes on the form fields themselves.
Appalachian. “Appalachian is a Firefox add-on that adds the ability to manage and use several OpenIDs to ease the login parts of your browsing experience.”
Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin (via) Neat WordPress plugin that forces a redirect to an item’s permalink if the URL has any extra crud in it.
Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin). “The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.” Fantastic idea—I really want this for my own site.
Guide to the Dabble DB Plugin API (via) This is really nice—Dabble POSTs your plugin script a bunch of CSV values, your script returns CSV for the derived fields. Doesn’t seem to state which flavour of CSV though.