Ruby, oEmbed, and Embedly - all that was needed was a little love

**Update 1/30/11: **They guys over at emedly who have done some awesome work in the last few months now ship ruby-specific gems to help with oEmbed. Check it out https://rubygems.org/gems/embedly Wacchen, trys to figure out what the best way to embed a users selected video into the web page is. Right now the best way I have is oembed. oembed is a great, simple standard for determing the best embed method for a give url. You just ping the service provider, ie youtube.com, with a url, and it will tell you the best way to embed the content from that url. There is alot of good python libs, and there are a few ruby libs. - oembed_links - based on the idea, that you will want to transform links inside text - OhEmbedr - ruby-oembed

I started out with OhEmbedr, but quickly I realized the downfall of all of the libs was that they had relativly few built in supported service providers. Even the fallback mechanism, http://oohembed.com/, was running into instance limits at google app engine. A couple weeks ago though, I remembered seeing that django-oembed, had been pumped full of new urls from Embedly, a new sort of meta oembed. Hoping they had done the same thing for ruby, I shot them an email, but no dice, as Sean Creeley said, “we are a python shop”, So, embedly didn’t have was a good ruby implementation, so I knew I had to do it my self. I forked a copy of ruby-oembed. And essentially, I took an awesome JSON file from embedly, that lists a bunch of simple regular expression urls they support. I was able to quickly load that file into ruby-oembed, and then I added some more tests, while not good tests, but tests. So, even though Embedly didn’t have a ruby lib, everytime I had a question Sean, was very quick with an email back. I am not entirely sure why Embedly is so cool, they don’t seem to do anything right now other then help people embed stuff, and that is awesome they do it really well, but they must have something super secret under the hood. Now, wacchen, has support for like 20+ videos providers out of the box. Embedly was a huge help. Next up, figuring out how to embed videos, found not on the original webpages. Like youtube videos, embedded in blog posts.