I bake a lot of my site - everything except the blog, in fact, which is hosted on Tumblr. I do, however, also pull all the blog pages down and render them to another domain, as an emergency "Tumblr has died again" measure. I can repoint a DNS record and I'm entirely stand-alone. In theory.
Brent Simmons talks about how he bakes his blog, and it's very similar to mine. However, he does seem to have a bit of cleverness in there that I'm jealous of:
I still get to write using MarsEdit, by the way. It talks to WEBrick running on my laptop.
I have an idea for this sketched out - clearly I have to finish implementing it. The obvious thing to do it to just expose the folder full of raw blog post sources via a metaweblog API. But it's such a horrible protocol to write for. Not that it's complicated. And I love XML-RPC. But it's just grown so organically that there's not really one authoritative source of "these are the methods you need". You just need to keep adding extensions from various people till all your clients work.
Also, I want to make life difficult for myself and write it in PHP, so it's easy to deploy.