Thanks to some friends on twitter, I recently discovered RailsWizard which is a very handy way of generating new Rails applications with the "right" things included.

I liked what it did a lot, so I took the generated file and saved it as a github gist:

https://gist.github.com/829521

Which provides me with a very handy starting place for new Rails projects.  This is a great way to get some of the housekeeping out of the way before we start: ensure we're using jQuery, add some gems that I always use like exception_notifier and will_paginate, and so on.