Is there a reliable way to tell search engine crawlers that a site hasn't been updated in X days so they don't need to re-crawl it?
Do they tend to believe the <lastmod> element in sitemap.xml ? And can I set that to apply to the whole site, not just an individual page?
Asking because tailing logs shows a vast amount of crawler traffic to Datasette instances that haven't seen any data changes in over a year - I may have to robots.txt block crawlers from them to save in costs, but I'd rather tell them "no point in crawling, nothing has changed"
Datasette currently has a plugin for configuring robots.txt, but I'm beginning to think it should be part of core and crawlers should be blocked by default - having people explicitly opt-in to having their sites crawled and indexed feels a lot safer datasette.io/plugins/datase…
Finally published my article describing the Baked Data architectural pattern, which I define as "bundling a read-only copy of your data alongside the code for your application, as part of the same deployment" simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/28/ba…
I've been exploring this pattern for a few years now. It lets you publish sites to serverless hosts such as @vercel or @googlecloud Cloud Run that serve content from a read-only database (usually SQLite) - so they scale horizontally and can reboot if something breaks
It effectively gives you many of the benefits of static site publishing - cheap to host, hard to break, easy to scale - while still supporting server-side features such as search engines, generated Atom feeds and suchlike
Anyone know of examples of SaaS apps that deploy stuff to your AWS account (lambdas, S3 buckets etc) using IAM credentials that you grant to the SaaS app? Is this a pattern anywhere?
I've seen examples of apps that will write your data to an S3 bucket that you own - various logging tools do this
A silly thing that puts me off using Docker Compose a bit: I frequently have other projects running on various 8000+ ports, and I don't like having to shut those down before running "docker-compose up"
Is there a Docker Compose pattern for making the ports runtime-configurable?
I'd love to be able to run something like this:
cd someproject
export WEB_PORT=3003
docker-compose up
And have the project's server run on localist:3003 without any risk of clashing with various other Docker Compose AND non-Docker-Compose projects I might be running
Announcing Django SQL Dashboard, now out of alpha and ready for people to try out on their own Django+PostgreSQL projects: simonwillison.net/2021/May/10/dj…
The key idea here is to bring some of the most valuable features of Datasette to any Django+PostgreSQL project
You can execute read-only SQL queries interactively, bookmark and share the results, and write queries that produce bar charts, progress bars and even word clouds too
I recorded a three minute video demo which shows the tool in action
Out of interest: if you have a blob of JSON on your clipboard and you want to see a pretty-printed version of it, what's your fastest way to do that?
I hit Shift+Command+N in VSCode to get a new window, paste it in there, then hit Shift+Command+P to get the command palette, type JS and select the JSON pretty print option - which I think I installed as an extension at some point
Other times I'll use "pbpaste | jq", occasionally I'll use ipython like so:
s = """<paste JSON here>"""
import json
print(json.dumps(json.loads(s), indent=2))
What are the options for "serverless" PostgreSQL like these days? My definition of serverless here is that you don't have to spend any money at all if you're not getting any DB traffic, and cost then scales up as the traffic and storage you are using increases
Aurora PostgreSQL is the most obvious option, though it's not clear to me if you have to keep at least one instance running for it or if it fully "scales to zero" for projects that aren't receiving any traffic at all
Consensus in replies seems to be that this doesn't actually exist yet - scale-to-zero for a relational database server like PostgreSQL is evidently a whole lot harder than scale-to-zero for a stateless web application server as seen with things like Google Cloud Run