trying to return the first shoutid as a number from the shoutbox hack

[Jenta]

with some help from friends, i have made the shoutbox act more like a chat

as you add a shout, its gets placed at the bottom
simple as all u do is change DESC to ACS and have an onload scrollto thing

the only problem with this is that you need to set your number of forumhome shouts to 999 or some other high number
i trim the shouts from time to time and never go anywhere near that number
they are just shouts, no need to keep 6 month old shouts

this is what i have now instead of the original code

PHP Code:

$shoutboxmax = mysql_query('SELECT shoutid from shoutbox_posts');
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($shoutboxmax);

$shoutbox_posts = $DB_site->query("
SELECT s.*, u.username AS absusername
FROM shoutbox_posts s 
LEFT JOIN user u ON (s.userid=u.userid) 
WHERE (deleted='0' OR deleted IS NULL)
AND shoutid > (($num_rows + 49) - $vboptions shoutbox_numberofforumhomeshouts])
ORDER BY shoutid ASC
"); 


this section pulls how many shouts there are

PHP Code:

$shoutboxmax = mysql_query('SELECT shoutid from shoutbox_posts');
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($shoutboxmax); 


which is then used here...

PHP Code:

AND shoutid > (($num_rows + 49) - $vboptions[shoutbox_numberofforumhomeshouts]) 


that 49 is the first shoutid currently in the database

what i need is to not hard code that but return another variable that will return the first shoutid number in that table

i tried...

PHP Code:

$firstshoutid = mysql_query('SELECT shoutid from shoutbox_posts LIMIT 1'); 


but that doesnt seem to return an actual number

once i can return a number i can then replace the 49 with $firstshoutid

PHP Code:

AND shoutid > (($num_rows +$firstshoutid ) - $vboptions[shoutbox_numberofforumhomeshouts]) 


any idea on how to do this?