thanks for the responses, i changed mysqli but i have another problem as well. my php.ini is set to display errors off and i've been trying to change the setting, i've restarted apache, looked for multiple files and everything. this is why i can't get any errors returned. also what do you mean be by code tags, html tags? let me know and i'll do it.
this is entire script
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<?php
$connection = mysql_connect("http://www.hotmail.com","","") or die ("couldn't connect to server");
$db = mysql_select_db("socialtemp",$connection) or die ("couldn't select database");
$query = "Select * FROM users";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("query failed :" . mysql_error());
echo "<TABLE BORDER='1'>";
echo "<TR>";
echo"<TH>Name</TH><TH>Number</TH>";
echo "</TR>";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo "<TR>";
echo "<TD>", $row['name'], "</TD><TD>",
$row['number'],"</TD>";
echo "</TR>";
echo "hello";
}
echo "</TABLE>";
//echo "hello";
mysql_close($connection);
?>
</body>
</html>
when i view the source code in the browser i get this
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>