If you are looking to see an artist site that successfully makes use of social media in a cohesive, well-branded fashion, look no further than the recently launched deru.la. My longtime friend and musical and web collaborator Ben Wynn, who releases music under the moniker Deru, has earned a place in my world as one of the most tasteful and discerning creatives active today. His textural, beat-driven music is incredibly descriptive and stylish and this heightened aesthetic flows throughout Ben's life and art. Having outgrown an already stellar flash-based site, Ben needed a place to display his growing collection of original photography, promote a new record scheduled for release in September, and curate a vast selection of videos, images, music, and other assorted randomness found primarily on the interwebs.

Having already become comfortable with web2.0 darlings including Flickr, Twitter and Vimeo, Ben saw the opportunity to leverage these mostly free third-party services to easily maintain his ever-expanding content output. Drawing inspiration from the creative Modernista, our solution was to create a site that pulls in other entire websites (via an iframe) while leaving a singular navigation menu overlayed on top to easily link to other Deru-related sites and content. In fact, there are only two pages that are served from the deru.la site itself (the front and press/about pages). The largest benefit to this technique was that a jukebox with a dynamically created playlist of Deru tracks can be played continuously while navigating from site to site, creating an integrated multi-media experience. Seamlessly enjoy the latest Deru grooves while perusing photos on Flickr!

Ok, geek time. Here are some details about the new deru.la:

- runs on a custom-built Django app that Ben uses to edit the front and press/about pages

- utilizes a number of open source Django apps to pull in content from various sources including FriendFeed and Flickr (primarily Consonance by Idan Gazit and django-syncr by Jesse Legg)

- pulls in the following services: Flickr (original and favorited photos), Youtube (favorited videos), Twitter search (microblog), Posterous (blog), ArtistData (show dates, calendars, and feeds), Vimeo (original videos), Delicious (links), MailChimp (newsletter signup)

- I call it a defraggregator site since it both fragments and defragments content via multiple aggregators (what?)!

I'd like to thank the talented Yash for his help with the Flickr syncr app and for teaching me that cron jobs are not quite as scary as they sound. Also, a shout-out my djangoLA friends who kindly permitted me to share this project at a meetup and gave me some good coding tips (as well as izze drinks and pizza).

I invite you to check out the site frequently, as Ben is tirelessly finding entertaining and/or beautiful oddities and entities that otherwise may remain unknown. I hope you enjoy deru.la!