I've been blogging with org-publish for a while, but I switched to a Ruby script instead [1]. I'd not recommend using org-publish for this, because it's slow, and it's hard to add new posts. It's nice for static projects (say like a bunch of PDFs or some documentation maybe), but it does not lend itself to a more dynamic thing like a blog (dynamic in the sense that you want to add new pages rather frequently). Applying a custom HTML template is difficult, it means you need to either implement many org-export functions or use HTML_HEAD settings and a stylesheet to tame org's output. I say this as a happy everyday user of Org mode, both for word processing and any sort of notes, and my entire agenda and todo-lists and stuff.

The JS is for interacting with tables, if I'm not wrong.

[1] https://www.gkayaalp.com/blog/20180221_siteremake.html