A Blogger's Identity Problem

I have enough trouble keeping up with my identity without Blogger making my life difficult.

Blogger announced (as I’m sure you have heard) that they are discontinuing FTP posting support. To 99.5% of those who use blogger – this is apparently not an issue. I’m one of the 0.5% that it does affect. My blog is a part of my larger website, and as such has an address that is an extension of the main domain. Website is www.kimewilliams.com. Blog is www.kimewilliams.com/blog. I use blogger to write and push my blog files, via FTP, to my web host and the /blog directory. This keeps all of my files on my host, connects them nicely to the main website (for search engine indexing) and easily reflects the connection between the larger website and my blog. I like it this way. Blogger isn't going to let me continue this after May 1, 2010.

There are several solutions but each of them creates its own problem. I could use Blogger's custom domain option, but this will result in a domain change and communicating that change to a large numbers of links, listings, etc. (It took be three months to get my blog listed at Technorati and going through that again isn't appealing). I could switch over to another FTP client (Word Press would work, I think), but then I lose some of the connectivity offered through Google (friend connect, blogger profile listing, etc.). Then there is the RSS feed change problem associated with the change...

So, frankly, I’m undecided on how to address this change. Any suggestions? Anyone? Anyone?