I'm back...
I kept having problems with the Apache + fast-cgi + RoR combination on Texdrive. Not their fault, but a limitation of the Apache fast-cgi bindings that I kept hitting. Thankfully, the very helpful Textdrive staff promptly provided a solution: they assigned a port to me so I could use lighttpd to host my Typo driven blog and other applications.
It took me a while and some challenges to get everything working again on the lighttpd + fast-cgi + RoR and lighttpd + fast-cgi + PHP in my environment. The bulk of it were learning pains. It looks like things are back to normal now, which is a good thing. If someone is curious, I'll go ahead and I'll post my final configuration files.
I still need to find a way to work around some of the Typo URL issues. I might have to write some url rewriting rules in order to make the transition transparent. Let me know if you are experiencing problems.
