a function that acts as an intermediary between ajax and the github gist api in my django application

create_gist.py

def createGist(request):
   if(request.method == "POST"):

      data = {}
      data["description"] = request.POST["description"]
      data["public"] = True
      filename = request.POST["filename"]
      data["files"] = {filename:{}}
      data["files"][filename]["content"] = request.POST["content"]

      url = "https://api.github.com/gists"

      auth_string = "%s:%s" % (request.POST["username"], request.POST["password"])
      auth_string = base64.encodestring(auth_string)[:-1]

      req = urllib2.Request(url, simplejson.dumps(data))
      req.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % auth_string)

      try:
         result = urllib2.urlopen(req)
      except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
         return HttpResponse('<p>error: ' + str(e) + '</p>', mimetype='text/html', status=e.code)
      except urllib2.URLError, e:
         return HttpResponse('<p>error: ' + str(e) + '</p>', mimetype='text/html', status=500)

      result = simplejson.load(result)

      embedhtml = "<script src=\""
      embedhtml += result["html_url"]
      embedhtml += ".js?file=" + filename + "\"></script>"

      return HttpResponse(embedhtml, mimetype="text/html")
   else:
      return HttpResponse('{"error":"no data sent"}', mimetype="application/json")