[Scott]

First, you do not need blob for the news. That's basically for binary data. Use TEXT. There is a limit to that but I have never come across it.

Second, if you have the ID's to auto increase, then if you delete 3 through 15, 16 will be next inline. It does not go to the next number in line unless the next number in line wasen't used yet.

If you want to number your fields, just do something like this:

$i++;

echo "News id: ".$i." News Title etc";

all in your while() loop.