##What is Fish Tank?
Fish Tank is an easy-to-use (I hope!) OS X GUI for the static blogging framework Octopress.
Octopress is supposed to be the "blogging framework for hackers," where most blog administration tasks are done using text editors and the command line, so why make a GUI?
Static blogs have a lot of useful applications outside hackers, and Octopress is a good framework for creating them. Also, sometimes even hackers prefer a nice GUI, and there are some useful enhancements that only a GUI can offer.
Right now, I am working on supporting basic features like:
- Create a new blog with a "wizard" walkthrough
- List, create, and delete blog posts
- Edit individual posts with a basic Markdown editor
- Edit the page template (colors, asides, etc.)
- Site generation, preview, and deployment
But later, I hope to add features like
- Import existing Octopress blogs and existing Markdown files (drag and drop posts)
- Integrated photo upload with Flickr API (to enable easy photo blogging)
- "Cloud" backup to GitHub, Dropbox, and maybe others
- Walkthroughs for setting up Disqus, Flickr, etc.
##FAQ
###Wait a second, isn't this against the purpose of Octopress? I mean isn't Octopress the "framework for hackers"?
Well, yes and no. Just because you're a hacker doesn't necessarily mean that you want to crawl through a text file to change the color of your background, or run rake commands to upload your website.
Also, I think there are actually a lot of cases where even non-hackers could appreciate static sites. Though signing up for a Tumblr account is still probably the simplest way to get a website for most people, if you want to put a simple blog in your Google Drive or Dropbox, or at your domain name that a techie friend helped setup, then Fish Tank is the solution for you.
I will also say that this harkens back to old WYSWIYG HTML-authorship tools like Microsoft Frontpage Express, except that instead of creating individual pages a novice user should be able to create a full static blog site (with all the fancy features of Octopress) to be hosted anywhere.
###Why Octopress?
It's nice.
You have to init the submodules.
For now, I'm locking down the Octopress version for each release. I can't predict how updates to Octopress might break the manipulations the GUI does on the blog repository.
I also don't support importing existing Octopress blogs now because I haven't decided how to deal with existing template modifications.
Copyright 2013 Tyler Barth
See LICENSE. Actually, I don't know yet. Probably MIT.