I spent some time going through a few Supernova themes, and the controls stand out. They let you adjust font size, ads, links, and similar elements in a way that feels direct and visual. After seeing several templates, I found this set of controls easier to use than most. For what I need right now, it's enough.
At $67, though, it's expensive. I don't currently have a use for it, so I'll hold off. The themes are still a good recommendation for WordPress users who want a lazy, low-friction setup—the kind of template that saves you from fiddling with too much code. One gap: the social options don't include WeChat.
I suspect things would get messy once you start adding every extra. For now, I'll organize what I have slowly. The controls themselves are great; there are probably similar tools in China.
The timing was funny: I had just been looking at GitHub's Jekyll—bare-bones but very geeky—and then came back to this. It felt like the comfort of being a blogger who doesn't program.
Update: FeedBurner offers an extension for this, and Mailchimp covers email marketing. It was the first time I'd seen that, and it looked powerful. In China, people mostly use instant messaging; abroad, email and asynchronous communication carry more weight. Wei Wuvu has written something along those lines. The Baidu Baijia article 'How Should You Greet Someone in an Online Chat?' touches on it—and the ads on Baidu Baijia are everywhere, far more than I expected. I read it in the Xian Guo app. The desktop version of Xian Guo was slow, which reminded me of the RSS subscription discussion. RSS is still clean, but it never became the trend.