Well "significant" is your words not mine :)
Unfortunately _why disappeared off the net and with it went (most of) his sites including this predominately Ruby blog site (Hackety.org).
Who knows perhaps it might get resurrected one day. But at least its not lost thanks to WayBackMachine.
BTW... All of _why's code was saved here: http://github.com/whymirror And among this you can find a small web framework he wrote in Io: http://github.com/whymirror/yown