It’s been a few weeks since the first post. I’ve been waiting for some interesting news to pile up.

The big news is that we’ve been sold out of servers for almost a week. New servers are being installed this week and we will announce a new plan stuctucture including BIG vps plans.

Many of you ask about how many mongrels should you run for your app? The answer lies in the archives of Mongrel-users here and here.

Matz announced Ruby 1.8.5 last week. In a few weeks, we’ll update the RPMs.

Jamis Buck announced Capistrano 1.9 beta. Tread softly with the Rails Machine gem. There are some changes to Capistrano that may produce some unexpected results with some tasks. More details to come after I spend some time with it!

Rails Machine customer Kevin Clark’s post on Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing In Rails made the front page of Digg.

As a Rails programmer, please take the time to learn more about Ruby. It’s a great language. Dr. David A. Black’s Ruby for Rails covers what you need to know.

Today, Justin Palmer announced Mephisto 0.6. Since it was just released today, our Mephisto guide might be out of date. Send us your notes!

Next week, we hope to launch a forum based on Beast, a new lightweight Rails-based forum written by Rick Olson (Mephisto) and Josh Goebel (Pastie).

If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, please, without delay, order a spare 2.5” SATA hardrive and a SATA firewire enclosure. Then install SuperDuper! and mirror your drive every night. Trust me on this one.

UPDATE: You should backup all systems, not just MacBooks. However, the SATA notebook drives are bit hard to come by in a pinch, so you can greatly minimize downtime by having one handy, cloned, and ready to go!