what is the best way for me to store approx 500chars of text in my table? text / varchar / blob / other? Can anyone explain the differences / benefits?

Hi,

If you want to store more than 255 characters of text in MySQL table, you should use the TEXT column type. CHAR and VARCHAR don't match your needs because both of them allow to store strings with max. lenght <= 255. The BLOB type is almost the same as TEXT, but it is generally used for storing binary data.