I've now switched over to building this site with Eleventy. At the moment there is very little CSS so it looks totally unstyled. I'll get to that later. What I do have now is a better develoment system.
I can write posts in .md now, and render them into HTML with Eleventy. Great! I have a single base HTML template that uses Nunjucks, and I can define a single head, header, and footer for all of my site pages easily. Woohoo! Took a lot of work today to get it all sorted but it's all working now and this will make it much easier to actually work on writing from here on out.
Not that I'm going to abandon learning webdev. I'm sure I'll keep building and customizing my website to my preferences. I have many sections I still want to build out. And of course I'll figure out my styling so this actually looks like something real. But for now, I have the bones and that feels pretty great.
Time to go the heck to sleep.