I wrote this because I thought it would be cool to let people host their own HN sites with very little overhead. CouchApps make it so easy to deploy your own site, simply push the code to a CouchDB. Also I learned quite a lot from building this. More info can be found here: https://github.com/lmatteis/hckr.it
There's still lots of work to be done, so don't hesitate to contribute :)
I saw you use couchapp, installed with npm. Have you tried kanso http://kan.so ?
There is also erica, a similar couchapp deploying script written in Erlang. That one comes with an ACE on-line code editor (so you can edit your couchapp as it runs).
There's still lots of work to be done, so don't hesitate to contribute :)