Moving from Custom MySQL-Based Blog to Drupal
You can create nodes from external databases using the Feeds SQL module (requires Feeds). You should create a content type for the fields you want to import, and use the Feeds UI to select the external database table(s), add a query, and map the output to the fields in your content type. 

Here are a couple of settings that you need:

Preparation: add your new source database to settings.php:

$databases = array (
  'default' =&gt;
  array (
    'default' =&gt;
    array (
      'database' =&gt; 'drupal_database',
      'username' =&gt; 'drupal',
      'password' =&gt; 'password',
      'host' =&gt; 'localhost',
      'port' =&gt; '',
      'driver' =&gt; 'mysql',
      'prefix' =&gt; '',
    ),
  ),
  'database_to_migrate' =&gt;
  array (
    'default' =&gt;
    array (
      'database' =&gt; 'database_to_migrate',
      'username' =&gt; 'migrateusername',
      'password' =&gt; 'password',
      'host' =&gt; 'localhost',
      'port' =&gt; '',
      'driver' =&gt; 'mysql',
      'prefix' =&gt; '',
    ),
  ),
)


Now: go to the Feeds UI, and start configuring:

1. Basic - attach to - your new content type
   Import on submission - checked

2. Fetcher - click "Change" -&gt; select "SQL fetcher", save

3. SQL Fetcher - click "Change" - select your source database

4. Parser - click "Change" -&gt; select "SQL Parser", save

5. SQL parser - click "Change" -&gt; Enter your query, select your database, save
   Verify that your query performed as expected, results are displayed.

6. Processor - select "Node Processor" for nodes

7. Node Processor - Settings: Here, you can choose the content type (again), 
   the author associated with the new node, format, expiration, and other parameters.

8. Node Processor - mapping: Here, you have to map the fields from the sql query
   to the fields in your content type. After you save, you can map the next field


Since you only have a couple of users/authors, you could create accounts for them manually. In your SQL query, you can select the users as well as the content/title/etc., and the new articles will then be associated with the appropriate authors. 

This has worked well for me with a limited number of nodes (&lt;1000). For large-number of nodes, I ran into time-out issues, and had to add a limit to the SQL query. Eventually, I just created a drush script to add the nodes from the command line (I had to add >50,000 nodes). 

Edited to add: I used this with Drupal 7. Please read the documentation for the modules for updated information: https://drupal.org/project/feeds, https://drupal.org/project/feeds_sql