The idea is that you can write your blog posts in your favorite coding editor instead of some web form. Some people find that easier - I certainly feel more at home in my editor.

Hell, if you were a real hacker, you would ssh to your server with vim or emacs, write the post in markdown or somesuch, and have your the blosxom-inspired clone you wrote yourself serve up the HTML.

The real reason it's "for hackers" is for marketing. That and improving its chances for a front-page mention here.

The real reason it's for hackers is that it uses Git and the command line to manage it. It may not be "hack-ery" enough for you, but it's certainly not software non-hackers are going to use.

The tagline has nothing to do with Hacker News, the fact that you would even say that is amusing.

"A blogging framework for hackers"

If it said "a blogging framework for writers" do you think it would even get mentioned at hackernews?

It seems like YABF, with the possible exception of pretty good support for code display.

Other threads here say it's basically Jekyll. I did some searches. It's not Jekyll. Jekyll has zero branding, it's just a github project.

Good taglines define a brand. This one's a good tagline. Good enough to get the front page here.

It's got nothing to do with HN, true, but "X blog engine for Hackers!!!11" grabs more eyeballs than "x blog engine"

Those damn marketers. Going after that HUGE hacker market again!!!

Funny and deserved an upvote, but in reality I bet hackers are more willing to invest in tools they find good. Still, it wouldn't describe the market size of course, but the worthiness of pursuing it.

That's the idea of Jekyll, which is what this is based on. Doesn't explain what makes this a "blogging framework for hackers" (other than their choice of using Jekyll).

Check out the plugins for sharing code http://octopress.org/docs/blogging/code This was obsessively designed with hackers in mind.

> The idea is that you can write your blog posts in your favorite coding editor instead of some web form.

What's so hard about using your own editor and when you're done, pasting your text in the web form?

That's how I always used Wordpress, but it's not exactly elegant. You always have to make little edits in a small textarea box. No syntax highlighting. Need to submit the entire article to save (instead of command-s). You lose your cursor position when you save (super-annoying with longer posts). Wordpress doesn't support markdown natively. etc.

Probably that it takes six pages of instructions to get it up and running.

Exactly why I prefer static pure HTML pages whenever it has a tiny chance of being good enough. That is for hackers in my book.

This is a static pure HTML page generator.

Everything is explained thoroughly but there are really only 3 steps, all on the first page http://octopress.org/docs/setup

1. Clone Octopress 2. Bundle install 3. Rake install

The reset of the documentation is about deploying, customizing, and updating.

I didn't knew about redradtable, it looks interesting, thanks for the link.

[Disclaimer: self advertisement follow ;-)]

I think that my own blogware fugitive[1] is by far more hacker-friendly than octopress. It only depends on git and it integrates completely in the normal git workflow by using hooks to generate static html from files. Also, the article files just contain their title (the first line of the file) and then the article itself. All the meta data are those from git: creation and modification dates, authors...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2799246

Octopress is a framework for Jekyll, which — like most static site generators — was built for hackers. Octopress is a well designed starting point for Jekyll blogging.

It's built around Git, you have to fiddle with the command line to post stuff. Those two things alone make it Not For End Users, at the very least.

I guess it's supposed to be because you can post via the command line which, last time I checked, does not make you a hacker.