As I really want to learn Ruby On Rails - and as I have chosen to build a "dashboard" for our home monitoring system (and not wanting to do it in Flash - as we have both iPhones and iPads) I found a ruby gem called "acs_as_dashboard" to start off with (version 0.4.0 for those that are interested).

But after wrestling with it on and off for 2 days and still not managing to get the application up and running I managed to find a downloadable demo called "acts_as_dashboard_example" - downloaded it, and it worked immediately!

This gave me a stable starting point - and I've now modified this with my own libraries, and managed to get it to display data from the home monitoring system - learning a lot about RoR as I go along. Excellent!