by Jonathan Rochkind, http://bibwild.wordpress.com
Capistrano automates pushing out a new version of your application to a deployment location.
I've been writing and deploying Rails apps for a while, but I avoided using Capistrano until recently. I've got a pretty simple one-host deployment, and even though everyone said Capistrano was great, every time I tried to get started I just got snowed under not being able to figure out exactly what I wanted to do, and figured I wasn't having that much trouble doing it "manually".