Finally? This was posted in September of 2007. You can see the section under "The Rails Way" used in a large number of plugins and gems, as well. The pattern is no secret.

That said, it is a nice article. It's just not new.

There's been a fairly large refactoring/re-architecting for Rails 3, including, unless I'm mistaken, avoiding alias_method_chain.

(I want to say that this whole pattern or ruby-ism is now being avoided in Rails proper, but that would only be hearsay based on something I think I read many months ago. ... Yehuda?)