I mean, Blogger's great and all that, but it's server-based. When it flakes out: is that my problem? my ISP's problem? a blogger.com problem? Desperately wanting to move this into Groove somehow...

For this, XML-RPC isn't the way. Nor SOAP; they just distribute the failure point back into the cloud. With FTP, there's very little to go wrong (he says, fingers crossed, before blatting the entire Cabezal website with a single line of code). There's certainly no database, or active code, on the server.