I had issues with the ruby gem the last few times I tried to install it (SSL certificate issue, I think?). Whatever it was, I did cursory research, realized it would take some time to sort out, and just went back to my MacGuyver setup.
I've neglected updating the manual for a while, but now it's up to date with improvements made in 1.3-1.5.
For the record, the google site verification is only for the search console. There're no google probes inside any pages.
There's an interesting edge case with heading_links=true and index that causes clearly unwanted HTML appear in the blog post links in the blog index. The cause is that index extraction happens after widgets run, so in the next release it will be done before that point.