@nick - glad to see your issue resolved
I have run this code
install.packages(c("processx", "later"))
options(blogdown.generator.server = TRUE)
Then restarted computer
blogdown::serve_site() v(0.2) appears to work fine. Looks good in RStudio viewer, opens in browser and i can click links to posts
blogdown::hugo_build() appears to run fine. No errors but a very small index.xml file (39,138 cf 13,612,366 on my remote site)
If I open the public/post/index.html file it works but of course links from it relate to the remote web site
I'm not clear where the post .html files are. Obviously I do not want to deploy and have all my 50+ posts disappear