MeMeme Plugin
MeMeme support is now a plugin to Venus. It started out life as a Ruby script with hardcoded paths that produced JSON which was fetched using AJAX techniques. While it has been deployed by others (example), the learning curve was clearly too high.
Over time it has slowly morphed into its current form: a single plugin for which the primary configuration required is simply an XPath expression which specifies where in the document you want the memes to be placed. The current code base has direct access to the parsed configuration file, adding more configuration options should be easy should that become necessary.
Along the way, I produced a html2xhtml plugin using html5lib. With that in place, it is quite possible to add a Memes list to a sidebar produced by the classic_fancy htmltmpl based template.