Typically to render a partial in rails you would type:

render :partial => 'my_partial', :locals => {:some => @thing, :else => @goes_here} 

I recently found that you can now simply type it like this:

render 'my_partial', { :some => @thing, :else => @goes_here }

It isn't in the documentation as far as I can tell, but works like a champ and is nice and concise.