I agree. I think the problem with the content creation piece is that it is so theme-specific. I have no clue what is going on with yours! And it would probably take hours of spelunking around your GitHub repo to diagnose the problem, which also makes it hard on the side of the helpers. I get DMs on twitter all the time asking me to look at their repo to tell them what happened 
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it would probably take hours of spelunking around your GitHub repo
Actually, this problem is in the local website - nothing to do with GitHub AFAIK. Even so "hours of spelunking" is probably still correct.
I think the GitHub repo reference isn't about its hosting config, but as a means of seeing what's what (since we're not on your machine, and the issue is probably unrelated to deployment). The theme-specificity looms larger than one might think, given how Hugo layouts, partials, and templating work (all of which, I should note, are in a part of the stack that blogdown doesn't control - especially not at the theme level!)
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This seems like a very real broader problem—when everything is working, Hugo is great. But when something breaks, unless you know what you just changed that probably broke it, debugging is mostly a lot of trial and error. If you changed everything between saves/builds, or realize later that something is broken, you're sort of stuck.
All that said, this all seems like a problem not at all unique to blogdown, but one endemic to at least Hugo and to some extent web development more broadly. I'm not a web developer, but there must be tools for debugging sites. Does Hugo print to a console or have logs or something? Is there a clever way to use browser developer tools for debugging Hugo? I don't have answers, but I strongly suspect they exist and could benefit a lot of people.
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