Using Datasette to publish data

In my department we have started to make a bit of space to allow for self learning to happen. I took the time to look at https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/, an ecosystem of tools that support data publishing. These tools are from Simon Willison, and they are fantastic.

I’d been meaning to look at the them for some time now. I used a jupyter notebook to work my way around getting some data together, and working with the tool.

In the notebook I:

• get some data about 100 BMJ articles using the crossref API
• take a selection of the metadata from those articles
• install Datasette locally
• use sqlite_utils to create a local sqlite database
• use datasette running locally to explore and interact with this data
• export to CSV from my local instance
• upload this CSV to an online instance of Datasette running on Glitch
• configure the Glitch instance to enable full text search on some of the fields

The final output can be seen running at https://watery-alder-carpenter.glitch.me/data/article.

Overall it went really well, and I’m excited about Datasette.

You can grab a copy of this notebook from https://github.com/IanMulvany/datasette-testing-bmj-articles.