setup your computer for Ruby on Rails development. Rails Installer is a good start point for Windows and OSX, if you're running Linux, I imagine you know how to use your package manager to set it up. This setup for Ubuntu might be a good start point.

Create a rails project in the blog directory

   $ rails new blog

Go into the blog directory and start

   $ cd blog

Create a scaffold for your blog

   $ rails generate scaffold Post title:string content:text
   $ rake db:migrate

Remove the index.html

$ rm public/index.html

Setup your routes to go to the blog index by changing config/routes.rb to

   App::Application.routes.draw do
      resources :posts
      root :to => "posts#index"
   end

Run the server and when it's up check it out

   $ rails s

Congratulations, you now have a functional but "butt ugly" (the technical term) blog, make it a little less ugly and clunky. Do what you can. Suggestions:

• Better (any) styling
• Change of labels
• Change of layout - have the index look more like a blog showing the whole blog article, or a larger portion with a "read the rest"
• Additional functionality, esp. that showing Ruby and/or other web development skills for extra credit