2. I need to look into self-hosted comments; but I was hoping to make the blog portion of the site static to keep it simpler. Project pages may have demos/etc that pull in JS libraries. But you raise a good point in 1 that also applies to 2 - given that I'm probably going to be reaching only a handful of people initially (and perhaps longer), worrying about bandwidth is a premature optimization.

3. I've just about talking myself into going with log-based analytics here. I find ga's omnipresence too worrisome to contribute to it, even with consent.

Thanks for that link, that's essentially the policy in my head before I started thinking about things like comment support. It's way better written than I would've come up with.