Hi Steve,
I just read the two articles in this series, and it's admirable what you are doing for the SQL Community.
Similar to what you've done here, I have recently moved my (old) blog from WordPress to Jekyll. In my case however I used GitHub Pages for hosting, which I found to be a simpler approach (and cheaper) than hosting in Azure Storage.
In fact my latest post is just about that - how I brought the blog back online. You can see this at SQL Server Diaries.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Cheers!
Reuben