The World According to Gio

If I wanted to have an embedded blog on the Casperian Books website (in the central text area) what free or low-cost software should I use and why?

Things I want: I want the whole thing to look like an integral part of the site so design flexibility is very important. Ability to syndicate. Tagging would be good, or at least categorizing of some sort.

Things to know: I'm very comfortable handcoding HTML and CSS. Have somewhat of an aptitude for basic programming (i.e. managed to fake my way through creating an asp form the other day without actually knowing asp), but am somewhat of an idiot when it comes to WYSIWYG editors to the extent that work had to get me Textpad because I couldn't grok Frontpage (this might have something to do with the Microsoft aversion as well).

Thanks.