recent posts with thumbnail on non blog page

<?php
//db parameters
$db_username = 'XXXX';
$db_password = 'XXXX';
$db_database = 'XXXX';
$db_host = 'XXXX';

$blog_url = 'http://mywebsite.com/blog/'; //base folder for the blog. Make SURE there is a slash at the end

//connect to the database
mysql_connect($db_host, $db_username, $db_password);
@mysql_select_db($db_database) or die("Unable to select database");

//get data from database -- !IMPORTANT, the "LIMIT 5" means how many posts will appear. Change the 5 to any whole number.
$query = "Select * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post' AND post_status='publish' ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 3";

$query_result = mysql_query($query);
$num_rows = mysql_numrows($query_result);

//close database connection
mysql_close();

// html page starts after
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

...


//start a loop that starts $i at 0, and make increase until it's at the number of rows
for($i=0; $i< $num_rows; $i++){

//assign data to variables, $i is the row number, which increases with each run of the loop
$blog_date = mysql_result($query_result, $i, "post_date");
$blog_title = mysql_result($query_result, $i, "post_title");
$blog_content = mysql_result($query_result, $i, "post_content");
$blog_permalink = mysql_result($query_result, $i, "guid"); //use this line for p=11 format.

//$blog_permalink = $blog_url . mysql_result($query_result, $i, "post_name"); //combine blog url, with permalink title. Use this for title format

//format date
$blog_date = strtotime($blog_date);
$blog_date = strftime("%B %#d %Y", $blog_date);


//the following HTML content will be generated on the page as many times as the loop runs. In this case 5.
?>


<div class="post"></div>

    <br />
        <span class="date">  <?php echo $blog_date; ?>:</span> | <?php echo '<a href="'. $blog_permalink .'">'; ?><?php echo $blog_title; ?></a><br />
    <br />

        <?php echo $blog_content; ?> <br /><br />


<?php
} //end the for loop
?>