I GOT IT TO WORK! 12 Firefox tabs and at least four or five different forums, plus tons of time spent trying to get it to work on my own Apache server with no luck (although I did finally get php to connect to MySQL on my machine, so that was a major unrelated breakthrough), and then Google threw me onto a page with good instructions on how to set up databases and stuff on Dreamhost, which happens to be where my website is hosted. And after reading so much about the wordpress installation and going over the config settings time and again, it all started fitting together, and fifteen minutes later, I have a wordpress blog set up on my domain…which is what I wanted to do two weeks ago and gave up in frustration. See, I knew with enough determination I could do it. Now I just have to see if I can figure out how to install and customize layout themes to see if I want to make this my primary blog…