Ruby on Rails

I'm working on building a 'utility' rails site that will only be used by myself and one or two coworkers.  I'm not concerned with security (it will be a local webserver only), appearance, etc.  I just need one thing to work.  The plan is this:

I have remote jobsites that will report back to our server via a small ftp file. For now it will just send us their WAN IP, but I plan on expanding this once I figure out the overall structure of what the heck I'm trying to do. :)  I want to be able to go to the local Rails webserver and see a list of all our jobsites with a list of their WAN IPs and last updated times.

So... I have the FTP side working.  I have the rudimentary Rails 'site' working, and I can manually enter jobsite info at the localhost:3000/sites URL.  I need to automate the process of parsing each FTP file and adding it to the database.  The parsing I can work out, but I am clueless on how to even begin updating this 'app' from a script that is 'outside' of the Rails app...if that makes sense.

I can run a script that parses the FTP file, but what approach do I take to get the parsed info INTO the database?

There are probably 100 ways to do this and I know 0 of them. :)

Thanks!

Jim S

( the issue I'm having right now is that since I don't even know what concept to use, I have to research different ways to do 'it', then I have to learn how to do 'it #1', then I go off on that tangent for a while, figure out it's not what I want, go back to researching other methods, then have to learn how to do 'it #2', go off in that direction for a while, etc.  I can tell you that I've learned more USEFUL programming knowledge over the past month now that I have something to work on than I have in the past 2 years doing random online tutorials and classes and having no real-world application for it... )