Way to build a short and beautiful step path to the land of Not Invented Here. It's one think not to write a tutorial to using one of the well supported OAuth gems. But you didn't actually commit to helping people either. If (and when) someone finds a bug in your implementation, they won't be able to fix it with a gem update, they'll just have to return to your gist for the lifetime of their app.
On the other hand, you've done a beautiful job at showing how simple OAuth can be. If I ever want to write a twitter client in Io or something, I'll definitely be ripping off your (apparently still copyrighted) code to do it.
On the other hand, you've done a beautiful job at showing how simple OAuth can be.
That seems to be the main reason for sharing the code ("unoptimized and ugly code, walking you through Twitter's OAuth madness" and "All I wanted was a pseudo-code example of the steps involved in the auth process"). Seeing it laid out in a step-by-step piece of code helps you grok the process for either building your own independent work or using other libraries. This is pseudocode that just happens to be Ruby code too ;-) It's far too unstructured for you to realistically be using verbatim in your app.
On the other hand, you've done a beautiful job at showing how simple OAuth can be. If I ever want to write a twitter client in Io or something, I'll definitely be ripping off your (apparently still copyrighted) code to do it.