After a lengthy conversation with my programming friend who lives in the Philipines (can't wait to hook up with you again when you come back to Toronto) where we debated the merits of Ruby ("it's elegant, just feels right but is a lot slower than PHP") vs. PHP ("build it with PHP and you're stuck in the htdocs directory") I took the first baby steps and created the shell of the application in Rails with a simple 'rails rallyhat.com' in a shell.

The next step is to get it into version control and experiment with using Capistrano to push it from my laptop onto a testing server. That will make for an interesting blog post I think.