could anyone give me a guide on 'where to start' with a small project of mine...

with my website, i was thinking of creating a text file that holds all my news in, imported into my news page using a php script.

all well and simple; rather than write html tags into that file, i was hoping someone might be able to give me some info on where i might start to write a small program that is like notepad, but that will place bold and italics tags into the text with the push of a button, much like ms word does.

can anyone give me some ideas on how i might do that using visual basic, or something similar?

any help would be appreciated for my first program!

If this is really your _first_ program, then you probably don't want to learn frills like GUI's at the same time as you are learning basic programming logic. Besides, why can't you just type HTML markup into the text file yourself? I think that would be the way that most of us would prefer, given the constraints you've mentioned already.