took another look at this again today, fixed a lot of the minor bugs still remaining

but fixing this bit... well, writing DEBUG variables into random bits of the HTML will continue until morale improves

right now all of these links look like they're working, but they're either going to the wrong place or nowhere

(once everything is working in terms of the migration, this is one of the first things getting yeeted in favour of switching everything to collections, because it should never have been written like this in the first place. i cannot tell you why i decided to roll my own instead of using what jekyll had built in, or how part of it ever functioned!)