I'm still moving along on the LarkWrite code, and one of tonight's tasks was to move some hard-coded strings out of views and into an external configuration file. After all, if I'm going to make this code available to people, eventually they're going to want to set their own titles and copyright strings, at least. I'd thought about a single-record database table, but using YAML for this seemed like a more sensible idea. The answer (or at least what seems to be a reasonably plausible answer) turned up over at Code Snippets - reading the entire YAML file in one fell swoop as part of environment.rb:

APP_CONFIG = YAML::load(File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/appconfig.yml"))

While I'm cautious about "programming by search engine," this looks like pretty much the solution I was hunting for in the first place.