As with most computer related things it seems, working on one problem always seems to expose a variety of new problems, some of which are blocking while others are just interesting optimizations. In the age of Squarespace and other such tools that allow one to erect aesthetically pleasing websites in a matter of minutes, part of the fun of this project is to tackle as many of the challenges I encounter head on. As such, I've spent the better part of my week working more on my new workstation than I have on the website itself.
It turns out that buying new hardware doesn't necessarily mean that everything will run flawlessly when you stubbornly insist your development environment must be run under linux. After about four separate clean install attempts of various Debian configurations, I finally gave up and turned to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS instead. For the past few years I have preferred to use Debian because I considered Ubuntu to be linux with training wheels. And perhaps it is, but I have to say it sure was nice to finish the install and not have to wrestle with the innards of my computer to try and figure out why my touchpad, wifi-adapter, and xserver all weren't running properly despite having seemingly downloaded the latest drivers from the stable-branch repository. Under Ubuntu, everything has pretty much just worked without my intervention (save for my GTX 960M), so now I can actually focus on the website itself.