Display Date/Time, Title & First X Characters of Newest Post on Non-WP Page

I’ve searched through the forums and it seems that this comes up a lot but that there are not a lot of solutions in place.

My blog lives in /blog on my server.

My homepage is, well, the home page. I want to display:

Date/Time
Title (linked)
<First X Characters/Words> of Newest Post

However, I want to display this in my layout and my styles–FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost only allows you to display everything at once, and that just not how my design is set-up, so that does not work for me.

I’m certain that I am not the only person attempting to handle this, but I’ve yet to see that solution.

Would it be possible to just query the WP database from the home page and pull down the latest post information?