This simple little hack - one model, migration, rake task, and cron job - will let your service adapt autonomously to the availability and responsiveness of third-party services.

EreIamJH is a ruby gem that discerns your geographic location (based on IP address) and posts it to your Twitter account. Set it up as an hourly cron job and never lose your laptop again?

Read your tweets via RSS, including @replies, direct messages and avatars.

...I used AJAX to provide a majority of the site functionality on the main page with it never having to reload itself or load another page. This resulted in a drastic drop of "page" views in my Google Analytics reports, because the only "page" being loaded on each visit was the sole main page; every click after that was an AJAX call to update only a portion of the already loaded page, hence not triggering any calls back to the Google Analytics tracking server.

Ruby on Rails documentation formatted for the iPhone http://pocketrails.com/