(photo credit: mrpattersonsir)

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer have just launched a new Rails blog called Rails Envy, and to kick things off Gregg has written an in-depth acts_as_ferret tutorial.

Ferret is a Ruby port of the Apache Lucene high-speed search library, and acts_as_ferret (created by Jens Kramer) is a plugin that makes it ridiculously easy to add search features to most Rails applications. You can add search capabilities with just a few lines of code in your models (to specify which columns to index) and by using some special finders. Gregg walks through the installation and use of acts_as_ferret and demonstrates how to integrate it into an existing Rails project.

If Rails Envy continues with content as good as this, it could become an essential read for Rails developers very quickly. Let's hope they keep it up!