I’ve been using hugo before to run this site. While it is super fast, I haven’t been that happy about it. I wanted to create my own theme, but the template lookup order felt like a mess to me. So I just decided to build a simple site with Emacs and use org-mode to publish some html. It is super easy and requires a single variable to setup. I also disabled the builtin styles and scripts and started to use cssbed instead, which is a collection of classless themes.
(setq org-publish-project-alist
'(("blog"
:base-directory "~/blog"
:publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
:publishing-directory "~/blog"
:section-numbers nil
:with-toc nil
:with-date nil
:with-author nil
:with-creator t
:time-stamp-file nil
:html-self-link-headlines t
:html-head "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"style.css\">"
:html-head-include-scripts nil
:html-head-include-default-style nil)))