After much investigation, there are really only two viable solutions for embedding rich content into WordPress posts. Photos from popular sites like Flickr and Google Photos are covered fine by the built in Embed widget. My preferred media portfolio site, Smugmug, is also supported with out-of-the-box WordPress, although if you have a custom domain like mine (media.bitrox.io), you have to do a bit of wrangling by modifying functions.php in the in use WordPress template to add a custom domain embed pointer.
The problem is with trying to embed rich media links to stories in things like washingtonpost.com, etc. What you want is for there to be a picture, the story title, a hyper-link to the story itself, etc. and not just a naked hyperlink.
Both Embedly and Iframely have custom embed handlers for hundreds of common/popular web sites. In addition though, and this is key, you can feed them just about any link and they will scrap it and return the best possible rich media “card” to the content and embed it in your post.
The problem is that they both expensive paid services. IFramely has a “free” tier, but it is limited to a certain number of hits each month. The limit is generous for trying it out, but even an non-pro blogger like myself on a person site will likely eventually run out of room and the absolute lowest per month pricing tier is $29/month. Not only that, but once you’re committed by embedding months or years of posts with IFramely content, if you don’t continue to pay up, all of your posts look like crap if you stop paying.
Embedly appears to be similar, but I need to check it out more thoroughly. One immediate comparable though is that Embedly is only $9/month; which is a whole lot more feasible. Still the same problem though with posts looking like crap if you stop paying I believe.
So interestingly enough, it looks like the Embedly widget does not require payment whatsoever. If you don’t have an account, it merely adds “powered by embedly” branding on the embed. Now that is something I can live with. I’m perfectly willing to pay the $9/month to pay for a solid service, but just don’t want it to break if I stop.
Here is a pretty decent blog post talking about Embedly:
