[Rails] Best Practice: Put all fields in a db column or lump some into a serialized hash in a TEXT column?

On my previous countless Rails apps, I've always put each data field as its own column in the DB, but on the last 2 projects, I've started to create a catch-all column that is a MySQL TEXT that I serialize and treat as a hash for a bunch of general stuff, from arrays, hashes, etc. This has worked

[Rails] Be careful of BIGINT primary key fields in MySQL. Will cause problems with ActiveRecord create (but not find)

The MySQL/Ruby library doesn't properly handle inserts into tables with the primary key being a BIGINT If the ID returned to the MySQL/Ruby library is LARGER than the INT range, the value is returned to Ruby truncated and incorrect. This is then passed up to ActiveRecord and into the id field of

[Rails] purpose of gems.rubyonrails.org

Is this gems repo supposed to be in sync with gems.rubyforge.org or is the rubyonrails.org gem server a regular build of the HEAD Rails revision? For example, I noticed that actionmailer version 2.2.2 is different on the 2 servers. The one on rubyonrails.org has a later version than what was the