>As to what becomes of the $guestbookreal part of the script I have no idea whatsoever.
>For that I would have to analyze the whole script and sadly I'm lacking in time to do so.

Unfortunately CountZero, I now know what the answer is! - it's what gets printed every time the script is run....
I couldn't figure out why I kept getting the same result over and over no matter what I put in the form, and so I tried deleting that $guestbookreal=newlistings line and got a "500 Internal Server Error"

Bingo!
explains why the date was showing up as February 13 etc. - because that's the same INSERT string that's been on the new_listings.page since Friday - not what's going through the script!
anyhow...

still glad to have been shown that it's possible to connect to MySQL this way (even if it's still not working quite right yet)

Many thanks CountZero, honestly :-)

-Bob