8 items tagged “yaml”
2020
Weeknotes: airtable-export, generating screenshots in GitHub Actions, Dogsheep!
This week I figured out how to populate Datasette from Airtable, wrote code to generate social media preview card page screenshots using Puppeteer, and made a big breakthrough with my Dogsheep project.
[... 1,461 words]airtable-export. I wrote a command-line utility for exporting data from Airtable and dumping it to disk as YAML, JSON or newline delimited JSON files. This means you can backup an Airtable database from a GitHub Action and get a commit history of changes made to your data.
Goodbye Zeit Now v1, hello datasette-publish-now—and talking to myself in GitHub issues
This week I’ve been mostly dealing with the finally announced shutdown of Zeit Now v1. And having long-winded conversations with myself in GitHub issues.
[... 2,050 words]2019
niche-museums.com, powered by Datasette
I just released a major upgrade to my www.niche-museums.com website (launched last month).
[... 1,154 words]2018
Analyzing US Election Russian Facebook Ads
Two interesting data sources have emerged in the past few weeks concerning the Russian impact on the 2016 US elections.
[... 922 words]2010
twitter-text-conformance (via) This is a neat idea: Twitter have released open source libraries for parsing standard tweet syntax in Ruby and Java, but they’ve also released a set of YAML unit tests aimed at anyone who wants to implement the same parsing logic in other languages.
2003
More YAML
Paul Tchistopolskii’s XML Alternatives reminded me to take another look at YAML. The specification has been updated since I last looked and seems to be a bit more complicated, but it’s still a very nicely designed format. Implementations are available for Perl, Python and Ruby with C and Java on the way but strangely no one seems to be doing one for PHP yet. I’m doing a course at Uni on compilers at the moment which includes quite a lot of stuff about writing parsers so I’m very tempted to have a go at a YAML implementation in the next few weeks just to try stuff out. The possibility of easily swapping relatively complex data structures between PHP and Python is pretty tempting as well.
2002
YAML
I forget quite how I got there, but the other day I found myself reading about YAML—YAML Ain’t Markup Language. It looks really interesting. YAML aims to be an easily human readable format for storing and transferring structured data—so far, so XML. Where it differs from the IT world’s favourite buzzword is that YAML is specifically designed to handle the three most common data structures—scalars (single values), lists and dictionaries. Here’s a sample (taken from the official specification):
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