You asked what it takes to make a blog.
I have a html front page, tag pages and posts. All static.
There is a pretty short php page that takes an existing post or the dummy, chops off everything in front and behind the text.
The tag cloud sits under it. Clicking a tag injects it under the text.
When saved the top and bottom html are reatached and the title <h2> is copied into the <title> tag.
It then creates or overwrites the static html document.
It finds tags in the html and inserts a link to the new article into the tag and index pages.
Load, split, join and save is actually less complicated than sql and faster:)
Deleting tags and blogpostings is done manually.
Besides editpost.php there is a bookmarklet to inject quotes with links and youtube embeds.