Change of template
I moved to a richer Hugo template, partly to move things around under the hood, but importantly it gives a sounder platform for the future.
However, it took many hours of frustration to get blogdown and the template to nicely render mathjax: true YAML header option needs to be changed to math: true. No need to alternate between .Rmd or .md or .Rmarkdown files, mess around with config.toml or params.toml, chase down unknown pandoc binaries or add new partials snippets.
In addition, I finally figured out how to automatically generate table of contents. Insert the following snippet in the file header: