> plus I want it to do specific things at certain times like upload all 
> files in a folder at 9PM every night

This is not so complicated.

First you should write a simple FTP "client" that connects to your
host. This is quite trivial, i.e.

  x = Net::FTP.new('ftp.members.a1.net')
  x.login('your_name','your_password')

Just look at the FTP class in ruby.

Once you can upload files, you can let this script run
at fixed times. One way would be with cron, or with
ruby daemons http://rubyforge.org/projects/daemons/
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