Today, after a lengthy discussion with Martin and Owen, two of the e-learning staff at my college, I came to the conclusion that there's a real gap in the market for a proper server based blogging platform that also has a simple way of creating posts offline, and of backing up an entire blog to a directory system on a hard drive - for peace of mind. I use the excellent free and open source Thingamablog for this very blog, which comes close to these requirements, but it doesn't offer all of the functionality of other true server based platforms like Moveable Type or Wordpress, such as the ability to post from anywhere, and from multiple devices. Thingamablog relies on a locally created database that can be duplicated on multiple machines but obviously this isn't as useful as having the ability to post from an Internet cafe or your mobile phone. I know it's possible to export an entire blog from many platforms, but then you'd have to import the whole thing again to be able to read it. Maybe there are other solutions out there. I'll have to look into it.