Welcome to the first installment of The Machinist, a review of what’s happening at Rails Machine.

We now have a blog. But you already knew that, because you’re reading it. It’s powered by Mephisto built by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer. Its great. You should try it. Read the guide.

I’d like to welcome Dave Goodlad to the staff. Dave has extensive experience with Rails development, Linux administration, and Xen. Stop by the campfire and say hi.

Take a look at our new Frequently Asked Questions and let me know what we missed or needs clarification. Answers for installing PHP 5 and Trac are on the way.

If you happened to miss last week’s fun and excitement, please run gem update rails now.

Zed Shaw has released various pre-releases of Mongrel 0.3.13.4. mongrel_cluster has been updated to go with it. Official releases should be available shortly.

I’m working on a new package called Swallows that provides support for multiple installs and stages of the same application. A pre-release will be available in the next few days. Take a peak at an overview pastie.

That’s it for today!