Organizing Content for Blog / Article Website

Hi,

I am very new to Drupal, but have used PHP, SQL, HTML, etc. for several years. I set up a LAMP computer on my home network with Ubuntu Server 7.10 for developing and testing websites. I installed and configured Drupal and am currently attempting to learn it on my first project for a blogger / author's website. I'll outline some of the features I'd like to implement, and I'd appreciate any help/advice regarding organization and use of modules, etc., to meet these requirements:

He basically wants three types of content: 1) Static pages, 2) blog posts, and 3) scholarly articles.

1. The static pages seem fairly straightforward to just use the "Page" content type and create links on the menu.
2. The blog entries will likely be displayed on the main page. These will be primarily reverse-chronologically based, but we may add tags/categories in the future. He'll post photos of events and brief thoughts on various topics. He will have comments enabled on most of these posts. He will be the only author on this site, so we only need one blog. I read somewhere in The Drupal Cookbook that a site with one single blog might be better off using the "Story" content type rather than "Blog entry." This is what I thought we'd do.
3. For the articles, instead of primarily displaying them reverse-chronologically, they will be classified in specific categories. He has defined seven categories he will primarily use, and I have set these up with the taxonomy module. The articles are more formal than blog posts and will likely have citations, etc.

   Here's the tricky part: He doesn't want comments to be posted to any of the articles themselves. However, when he writes an article, he'd like a teaser of it to also be displayed as a blog post that people can comment on. He might want the "teaser" to be a regular blog post that just—more or less—links to the article. So he wants any comments regarding the article to appear as comments to the "blog post." It seems like the blog post would need to be a separate node from the article, but we'd like to enable the blog post to be created automatically when the article is published (if reasonably possible).

   Finally, he'd like to be able to write series of articles and group them together. Let's say he publishes three articles per week. Furthermore, on the next three Mondays, he'd like to publish a series of related articles. Is there a typical way something like this is organized with Drupal?

I've looked at some modules including Views and CCK, but I'm not sure the best way to approach this. Could someone point me in the right direction including where to look, what to read, or recommended modules? I'm just not sure how it will work from a visitor and technical standpoint to have the blog posts and articles separate. Also, these features are tentative of how we were thinking the website would work. I'm open to any other ideas.

Thanks!
Josh