My use case is that I'm just making a website that I want people all over the world to be able to use, and I want to be able to say things like "This happened at 5:33pm on October 5" and also "This happened 5 minutes ago," etc.
Should I use the datetime module? Or just strftime? Or something fancier that isn't part of the std distro of Python?
Take a look at the dateutil module:
http://labix.org/python-dateutil
It's good at doing the types of things you're looking for - see some of the examples in the documentation.
You may have a look at Django's humanize module.
It is part of Django, but I think it would be quite easy to adapt it to your needs.
If you're going to use datetime, make sure you read this recent and most excellent article:
Tips on using python's datetime module. datetime will take care of most of the niceties of handling time arithmetic, but it won't give you the English-language pretty printing you're looking for.
The datetime module in Python will allow you to get/set/manipulate dates and times. A question about relative date formatting in Python has already been asked: Stack Overflow Post but with very little responce.
Try relativeDates Module module. It exactly brings you the stuff you wanted.
I have always been very happy using the datetime package. You get a lot of stuff for free, and it's pretty easy to create datetime objects as well, calculate duration ect.
There is also the Time module.
