Houston: We have liftoff...

Well... I managed to get everything transferred from my development environment to the online site for 'real world' testing. Several glitches along the way:

• Of course, all the email configuration changed, and that involved reviewing some FAQs and emailing tech support. The process was fairly confusing when setting up the ActionMailer::Base.server_settings in the config/production.rb, but I finally got that straightened out (with a fair amount of help from the folks at RailsPlayground.com). Along the way I forgot that relaying is a no-no, so had several emails bounced.
  
• There's also the question of what to put in the "from" field (models/notifier.rb) when actually setting up the email, and that's where the "no relaying" came in: I had to use an email address from railsplayground to make that happen although that's only temporary: eventually, it has to be a valid email address from my domain.
• For now, I'm just manually transferring the information (using FileZilla) from my development machine to RailsPlayground and -- of course -- that leads to problems. I forgot to run db:migrate the first time, then I failed to update my production configuration, then I had to deal with the email configuration, then somehow one of my controllers wound up in the config/ directory(?)... but all-in-all, successful. This makes it clear that I have to start using svn and (possibly) Capistrano...
  

Finally worked through all that, and I'm now able to test the site on the web, instead of in my development machine, and have a few of my friends bang away on it.

Production ActionMailer configuration:

ActionMailer::Base.server_settings = {
:address => 'localhost',
:port => 25,
:domain => 'railsplayground.net',
:user_name => 'myname',
:password => 'mypassword',
:authentication => :login
}

Development ActionMailer configuration (using the free SMTP server mentioned previously):

ActionMailer::Base.server_settings = {
:address => "mail.mydomain.com",
:port => 25,
:domain => "localhost",
}


BTW, the folks at RailsPlayground.com do a really nice job of Ruby on Rails hosting. For $5/month, you get a site (single server; no multiple mongrel's), plus access to subversion and Trac (which I'm just starting to set up... lots to learn there!). And... their email tech support is VERY responsive. I give them a question and usually have an answer within 10-15 minutes. Bravo!