Well, it happened. It took a few days of work, but I taught myself enough Ruby on Rails to fully refactor Monkblog from PHP/Laravel to RoR.
The blog is now running on Heroku, and my next step will be to setup continuous deployment. I'm pretty excited about this development! I'm officially running a Ruby on Rails app in production that I wrote myself.
And of course, now that that's done, I'm working on improvements to the blog. The first order of business will probably be to make the writing screen look and feel more like Ghost's marvelous editor.
I also need to port all of my old content from wherever I can find it into this new blog. I lost several posts when my old web server died (long story), but I imagine I can restore them easily enough. Just need to find backups...