Drop #139 (2022-11-17): Random Time Sink Drops

Official SQLite WASM; Static Timeline Generator; FediDB

ICYMI: I discovered that Observable collections and users have RSS feeds! Which means you have a pretty great place to do blogging (JS/datavis not required), provided you don't mind relying on a third-party hosting your data.

Official SQLite WASM

Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran on Unsplash

SQLite v3.40.0 was released yesterday, with official support for compiling SQLite to WASM and running it in web browsers! The project has its own, dedicated sqlite3 WebAssembly & JavaScript Documentation Index, which notes that, " components will be released for public beta with version 3.40 and tentatively made API-stable with the 3.41 release, pending community feedback.".

Official WASM support was due, in part, to the work of many other projects, including:

• Emscripten (which is a prolific WASM toolchain that we've covered before)

• sql.js (which was the previous way to get SQLite WASMified, and that we've covered before)

• absurd-sql (the magic behind local sqlite3 database persistence using IndexedDB)

• wa-sqlite which pioneered sqlite3 WASM Origin-Private FileSystem (OPFS) — an API providing browser-side persistent storage.

A (minimal) full working demo is available, and you can get up and running in a matter of minutes.

Official support means we'll see lots more features moving forward, and more/new projects will likely be built due to this new, core support.

Static Timeline Generator

Photo by Lin Dai on Unsplash

Molly White (@molly0xFFF), the incredible, snarky talent behind Web3 is Going Just Great is not just good at presenting the comedy gold that is the web3 grifter movement. Molly is also a highly capable senior software engineer with a diverse set of interests. One of them is data visualization and information communication, and one of the projects under that umbrella is this spiffy timeline generator.

Timelines make it possible to communicate events in both a story-driven, and (often) interactive manner. Rather than generate a widget you stick somewhere on a webpage, Molly's tool lets you build timeline webpages (via the 11ty site generator), which makes for a more immersive experience.

All you need to get started is some timeline content, NPM, and some place to shunt the generated content (which is highly customizable).

To see what these are like, Molly has some examples online.

Any cyber folk that read this newsletter may appreciate having a tool to help make prettier timelines, given that we have to make these type of artifacts on-the-regular.

FediDB

Photo by Inbetween Architects Jerome Charignon on Unsplash

I was going to save this for the Weekend Project edition, but it felt like cheating giving Fediverse-related, back-to-back weekend projects, so you get to peruse FediDB today, instead.

FediDB is a compendium of tools that make up and information about the Fediverse. Along with a regularly updated view of the network, FediDB has a catalog of "all" the known bits of software that used in the Fediverse, with links to the project pages, and metadata about usage of each service.

It's a fun site that may help you discover new corners of the Fediverse to explore.

FIN

Programming note for those that are/were following me on the bird site. I've ceased pushing new #30DayMapChallenge posts there and will stop pushing these newsletter announcements there starting December 1, 2022. @hrbrmstr@mastodon.social is the general purpose one to follow for updates as I slowly stop generating revenue for the capricious child billionaire running the site. ☮