I guess we're using Hugo
After giving a long, hard look at what my theme options were, I've realized that the theme I was trying to use, Harbor , was trying to do too much, and didn't have the documentation I needed in its readme. Something wasn't clicking in my head. So I went and tried out new stuff, and eventually settled on hugo-bearblog . Reading the readme pointed me to the relevant files that I needed to copy and edit in order to finally get my blog the way I wanted it to look.
The resulting blog looks really good, and is just as simple as I want it to. Getting RSS working was surprisingly challenging, but I got it up eventually. If you're reading this, this means that I've already gone ahead and bought a domain and finally have this put up online.
Now, getting this set up on Hugo doesn't mean that I won't try and build my own system. It just becomes something good to have ^1 .