Warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /Users/scott/Sites/usic.net/wp-includes/functions.php on line 35

I found this post that talks about setting the time zone in Wordpress. Unfortunately, just setting a default time zone didn't fix the problem (it's still a good idea though).

The solution was to set a default time zone in my /etc/php.ini file:

 
date.timezone = "America/Boise"
 

You might not have a php.ini file in /etc. If you don't then look for a file called 'php.ini.default' and copy that to php.ini.

It is very likely that at some point you will need to send out emails from your application. Don't cry. Gmail can do this for you. Rails 2.3.2 makes it easier than ever with the addition of 'enable_starttls_auto'. Put the following code in production.rb, development.rb or environment.rb and you 'should' be able to send out emails:

 
  ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
    :enable_starttls_auto => true,
    :address        => 'smtp.gmail.com',
    :port           => 587,
    :domain         => 'your.domain.com',
    :authentication => :plain,
    :user_name      => 'login@your.domain.com',
    :password       => 'some_password'
  }
 

If you are one of the lucky ones this will actually work. It didn't work for me but since I still needed to get email working here's what I did:

First be sure to activate the email account that you are using. To do that you only need to login. Google will walk you through entering a captcha etc.

You might get this error:
Net::SMTPAuthenticationError: 530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first.

If you do then check your Ruby version. Ruby 1.8.7 has this built in but Ruby 1.8.6 does not.

I'm currently running my apps on EngineYard's Solo product <a href="https://cloud-support.engineyard.com/discussions/problems/203-engineyard-cloud-support-for-ruby-187-p73">which is currently using Ruby 1.8.6 so changing versions isn't an option (not an easy option anyway).

The next best thing is to get action_mailer_tls. Most of the links you will find in forum and blog posts are broken. The code is on github and neatly packaged as a gem: http://github.com/openrain/action_mailer_tls/tree/master. Follow the directions to install and configure the plugin there and you should be able to send email.

Here's a couple of handy conversations for reference:
http://www.railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=28480
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/184137