Blogger Ruined My Life

Ok, maybe that's a bit dramatic. Anyway, everyone who reads this blog (yes, both of you) will notice that it looks like a piece of off-the-shelf preformatted crap right now. There's a reason for that. As of May 1st, 2010, Blogger will no longer support FTP publishing, which also means that the custom HTML blog templates I spent hundreds of tedious, meticulous hours designing for my own blog and two or three others are going directly into the toilet.

I figured I may as well get a jump on things and experiment with the remaining possibilities while I still have a little over a month to make the switch. I have set up a redirect from my site to the blogspot address that my blog is now being hosted on. I really hate this template, but it was the closest match I could find to the color scheme of my website. I hate that the post width is like an inch, or that there seems to be an indelible navigation bar built in to every template that Blogger uses.

Please, if anyone can point me to a fully-customizable blog service that doesn't require me learning an entirely new programming language to use, I would appreciate it. I am great with HTML and CSS, as well as SQL. I have experimented a very little bit with WordPress and was also looking into Tumblr, but I'd like some suggestions and advice before I decide to get too committed and entrenched in a new service. Blogger just isn't going to cut it anymore. Thanks!

EDIT: Since this post was published, I have discovered that Blogger has incorporated some new beta features that will hopefully allow me to customize the blog layout more than I had originally thought possible. Experiments to follow. Over and out.