railscasts

We all learn differently but have you considered looking at actual Rails system as a source of inspiration and guidance? I generally find this the best way to learn. There's the RailsCasts site which is open source: https://github.com/ryanb/railscasts And, shameless plug, I'm kinda proud of the code quality for the Mogade server (myself feeling i just did the transition you are seeking to make): https://github.com/mogade/mogade-server

Since you're doing a custom Rails app, may I point you at this: https://github.com/ryanb/railscasts/blob/master/app/controll... https://github.com/ryanb/railscasts/blob/master/app/views/ep... That's all you'd need to do. Oh, and if you submit your feed to http://feedburner.com/, you can hand out their URL instead, and you'll get stats and stuff.