So between rubyforge and github rails gems probably has a solution to any web app feature you want, and its probably better than anything you could roll yourself. Case and point Chronic. Chronic gives you really nice "natural language" (english only) time parsing. Only problem is that out of the box it doesn't understand time zones. Enter this helpful post. http://mad.ly/2008/09/25/making-rails-time-zone-aware-attributes-and-chronic-play-well-together/ 2009-05-15T10:02:23-05:00 4 true 2009-05-15T10:02:23-05:00