Can someone recommend a guide for making a blog from scratch with php and mysql

I doubt you'll find one, just because of WordPress.

simple guide to coding a "blog"

Decide what features you want to have as a baseline;
Write code to implement them;

Ongoing development
Decide what features would be useful;
Write code to implement them;
Integrate into baseline code.

A blog is simply a database driven website, if you have the basics of a server side language and database integration then you should be able to create one.

The only differences are implementing features such as trackback and generating dynamic RSS feeds. For those you will need to extra research.

Jamie

Yeah, it's not that hard. I think using a tutorial like the ones on Tizag would be enough to make a simple blog with most of the simple functions enabled.

I posted on this somewhere before but I can't seem to find it.

In it's simplest form you would simply need to create a couple of tables in your database to store each blog and link it to a particular user in your user table.

Maybe your blog table would look something like this:
blog_id ( unique id of the blog )
blog_user_id ( the user that posted the blog; or maybe it's just you )
blog_date ( date the blog was posted )
blog_body ( the actual blog body )

After your table, it will simply be a matter of building a form to insert the blog data into the database and then making a page to grab the blogs from the database.