I set up authoritative nameservers at home using unbound, which appears to be considerably easier than configuring BIND, but I still can't say that I fully understand it. DNS (and networking in general) is a bit of a dark art.
It can be tricky with certain sites to track down the correct domains to whitelist without giving a whole swath of ad domains the keys to the kingdom. Getting weather.com working was a bit of a bear in this regard (I know the information they present is available elsewhere ad-free, but I find the way they package that information convenient and I'm nothing if not lazy).