I have decided to wean myself off google services and migrate my blog to pelican. Pelican is a static website generator written in python with theme support.
There are many advantages to using a static website. From my perspective the main advantage is that there are fewer things that can go wrong. Static pages are also easier to understand. I only rarely add a new article to my blog so there is no need to use a database to dynamically update the blog.
As always the biggest problem was selecting a theme to start with. I ended up using the really nice looking voce theme developed by Benjamin Lim. I am also using the the pelican cover image and twitter card plugins. You can find my modification of the voce theme on github.
I also have a work related blog. My photos will still get shown on marsupium photography.