Honestly, the overwhelming number of tool choices and themes is the biggest hurdle these days.
I will shamelessly plug my solution: md2blog. You just plop Markdown files into folders and it does the rest, without letting you get distracted by themes.
Edit: addressing the article, md2blog does not support email subscriptions, but it does generate an Atom feed. It also requires using a command line (but the tool is a single binary, so no installation or dependencies to deal with).
I will shamelessly plug my solution: md2blog. You just plop Markdown files into folders and it does the rest, without letting you get distracted by themes.
Edit: addressing the article, md2blog does not support email subscriptions, but it does generate an Atom feed. It also requires using a command line (but the tool is a single binary, so no installation or dependencies to deal with).
Link: https://jaredkrinke.github.io/md2blog/