I'm pleased to announce the release of djangoembed, a django app for consuming and providing rich media.

What is OEmbed?

OEmbed is a format for allowing a rich representation of a url. If you've used Facebook you've probably seen this feature before -- linking a YouTube video will embed an actual video player in the news feed, automatically. The player is represented by some HTML, plus there may be additional metadata like the author, a link to their channel, the title of the video, or even a thumbnail.

Last week, after several false starts, I moved all the sites I maintain into virtualenvs, with their own pip requirements files. My reasons for doing so are pretty simple:

• Experimenting with new/different versions of software is a pain in the ass without isolation
• A pip requirements file for each site is a very nice thing to behold
• I symlink 3rd party apps into a custom directory on my PYTHONPATH and it was getting huge
• Profit

There are quite a few great tutorials out there for getting started with these tools. I will only discuss how I got over some of the hurdles involved in using these tools, as well as a tool for automating the creation of "skeleton" django sites.