I\'m not understanding how Twitter Bootstrap does active links for the navigation. If I have a regular navigation like this (with ruby on rails linking):
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You sound like you need to implement a navigation system. If it's complex, it might get pretty ugly and pretty fast.
In this case, you might want to use a plugin that can handle that. You could use navigasmic or simple navigation (I would recommend navigasmic because it keeps the main layer in a view, where it belongs, and not in some configuration)