OK, I think I'm reasonably happy with my site now..
I finally found out how to deal with hyphens in frontmatter in hugo (the documentation of which is a lesson in frustration).. Now to see when I hit post if reverting my micropub endpoint hacks have broken anything..
I'm now using a webmentions hook to deliver interactions to the site.. though, I want to fiddle a bit with nginx to move some of the php files to a non-public directory..
I've given the html a semantic overhaul which will hopefully make it reasonably accessible though there will be more work to do there (particularly around captions and alt tags for images).
In this vein I also removed all floats (I think) and am using grid and flex for layout. Have dropped a bunch of excess html and css too..
Have hidden my switch to 日本語 button until such time as I actually have a reasonable amount of Japanese or bilingual content.
Still a work in progress but much further down the line than previously.