PHP Beginners Help

Hello, my name is Ben Stones. I am quite a beginner to PHP, and as a new years resolution I am going to learn PHP (finally!) Cut to the chase I have created a basic looping script that would display anything submitted in a form, on seperate lines; here is the PHP code: $con = mysql_connect("localhost","ben_test","------removed-----") or die("con"); $db = mysql_select_db("ben_test") or die("db"); mysql_query("CREATE TABLE comments (messages varchar(255))"); $comments = $_POST['comment']; $sql1 = mysql_query("INSERT INTO comments (messages) VALUES ($comments)"); $mysql_query_one = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM comments"); while($rows=mysql_fetch_array($mysql_query_one)) { echo $rows['messages'] . "[br /]"; } Everything went swell for the first half, and after I truncated the test messages (or everything in the column, if you like), I tried doing one more test run and upon clicking 'Submit', nothing would display except the messages I added via phpMyAdmin. Hope someone could help me. PS: The password has been edited out of the preceding code as well as the HTML code purposely for the mailing list.