Jamis Buck has a good article on how to run TextDrive and Lighttpd together. It involves switching the Rails FastCGI processes to be managed independently from the web server. Essentially, the Rails FastCGI runners become independent daemons.
But what’s really useful is the tip in the first comment. It mentions an obscure crontab feature: @reboot. This will let you, as a user, execute a script when the machine boots up. This is dead handy, as it means that your application can be automatically restarted on server boot without having to bother the sysadmins.
More info:
Jabbering Giraffe 