jjddss

It might have went over better had you attributed the quotes to some "third party", like "Mr. ERB Exponent, December 2011". You don't risk personally offending the reader. The tradeoff is it might make the joke a little less obvious. (I might Google for "Mr. ERB Exponent", thinking it's a web persona who was notorious for expounding on ERB.)

Writing is hard.

(For what it's worth, the attributions didn't bother me.)

"Private hosting" in this case, can be as simple as a plain-jane Apache server with some tarballs in a directory with listing turned on. Use -f to point pip to the directory. Instant private hosting. This is more or less how we publish internal libraries at work.