Markdown - 59 times faster: Ryan Tomayko wants to “move past BlueCloth.” The result is two significantly faster Markdown libraries for Rubyists.

Cry: Cry is a Ruby library that provides a nice object oriented way to create, transfer, and manipulate frozen parse trees.

New Ruby Social Network: Acts As Community is a new social network for Rubyists.

Building an MP3 Player with Ruby and Shoes: Satoshi Asakawa has put together a cute tutorial demonstrating how to create a GUI-based MP3 player using Ruby and _why’s Shoes library.

Capistrano 2.4.0: Deployment tool Capistrano has hit version 2.4.0. Lots of new features and tweaks.

“Run Ruby Script” Action for OS X’s Automator: Jason Foreman has put together a custom action for OS X’s Automator tool that makes it easy to run Ruby code from an Automator workflow.

Lazy evaluation for Ruby methods: Lazyeval is an interesting library that makes it possible for methods to only be executed on objects when they’re actually needed (ideal if you’re doing caching on Rails views but still need logic in the controller).

Guide to using Sphinx: Pat Allan has written a great article on installing and using Sphinx, the search library.

Bashfully Yours, Gem Shortcuts: A little Bash script that lets you gain quick access to the RDocs for your installed gems.

Phusion Passenger 2.0 RC 1 and Ruby Enterprise Edition Released: The guys at Phusion have unveiled a release candidate of Passenger 2.0 (now supporting Rack) as well as Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Sequel 2.0: A significant update to the Sequel database access abstraction library has been released.