Question: What are best practices for managing custom logging in Ruby? Should I be monkeypatching logger to do what I want? Or extending from it? Or delegating? What's the rubyish way? I'm sick of custom hacks for this; I'd like something cleaner, and ideally more elegant.

Answer: 
Bates has a [screencast](http://railscasts.com/episodes/56-the-logger) on customizing logger.

And here is a blog post on custom [logging in Rails](http://ianma.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/custom-logging-in-ruby-on-rails/).

Here are some tips on [logging in Rails](https://web.archive.org/web/20100527042613/http://maintainable.com:80/articles/rails_logging_tips).
There's a Ruby implementation of Slf4j, the popular Java logging framework, imaginatively called [Slf4r](https://github.com/mkristian/slf4r). This separates the actual logging method from the code, and provides a standard interface for logging different message levels.