While there certainly are several good file upload plugins for Ruby on Rails. It is actually somewhat hard to find any good tutorials on how to do it yourself. I just wanted to post to great links that helped me figure the whole thing out 
http://blog.vixiom.com/2006/07/26/rails-stringio-file-upload/
http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/78
(Now I also know where to look when I have to work with file uploads in the future)
