The blog uses Redis as primary data store, unfortunately there is Ruby between the user and the DB ;-)
Btw here the problem was mine, I was running the Sinatra app wit "ruby app.rb", and Apache was mod_proxing to this running on port 4567.
By default mod proxy will suspend the connection 60 seconds with an error if the proxed thing returns something wrong. Idiotic default that can be avoided just with:
> Sorry, the Sinatra based site is deployed with "ruby app.rb". Probably not enough..
Since you are running it as "ruby app.rb", I take it you aren't interested in doing an app server/web server/cache deployment. But if you aren't using thin, that's only a "gem install thin" away.
By the way, check the page first, give bloggers the traffic their content deserves!