I also wasted a bunch of time trying to set up a Gitlab powered blog with Hugo (doesn’t work) and Hexo (works). Dunno why these are so convoluted compared to just writing HTML/CSS manually, though. Not sure what to do re: dev log but I would definitely prefer to host it myself…
I’m definitely close to just hand writing a simple blog website. At least I know an update to some platform or framework or browser standard or whatever couldn’t break it.