Installing Scot is a little complicated.  For the purposes of this guide, it
will be assumed that the bot, the web interface (including the httpd) and the
database are running on the same PC, although there's no reason in practice
why they can't be in different places.

Let's start with some prerequisites:
Java 2 J2SE 1.4 - download from http://java.sun.com
MySQL - download from http://www.mysql.com
PHP 4 (with MySQL access compiled in) - http://www.php.net
A web server that supports PHP - I use Apache

Make sure all of the above are installed and working correctly. :-)
The first thing you need to do is to create yourself a MySQL database.
Run "mysql -u root -p" (you *have* set up a root password for MySQL... haven't
you?) and enter the command "CREATE DATABASE scot;".  This will do exactly what
it says on the tin.  Now you need to create some database users: at least one
each for the java and php interfaces, and I would also suggest a regular user
with full privileges to scot's database to save you from having to log in to
MySQL as root every time you want to edit things manually :-)
To do this, enter the following commands:
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE ON scot.* TO scotbot@localhost IDENTIFIED BY insert_bot_password_here;
GRANT SELECT ON scot.* TO scotphp@localhost IDENTIFIED BY insert_php_password_here;
GRANT ALL ON scot.* TO regular_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY another_password;
replacing all the passwords with ones of your own (NOT important ones that
you use elsewhere!) and "regular_user" with your username (for convenience).

Now quit mysql ("quit") and run "mysql -p scot" (or "mysql -u regular_user -p scot"
if you ignored my suggestion that regular_user be your username...)
Enter the following command to create the table used by Scot:
CREATE TABLE scot (TINYTEXT commenter NOT NULL, MEDIUMTEXT comment NOT NULL, TIMESTAMP timestamp PRIMARY KEY);
Again, quit mysql.

Now you can set up the IRC bot interface to your weblog database.  Change into
the "scotbot" directory of this distribution, and change the database password
in Scot.java to the one you typed into MySQL.  Now edit ScotMain.java and enter
the details of your IRC server in the relevant places.

Get pircbot.jar from http://www.jibble.org/pircbot.php (version 0.9.5 at the
time of writing), and save it in the same directory as the Scot java files

Now run "./compile", making sure that javac is in your path.

Finally, run "./run" - you should see a string of messages from the server
as the bot connects, and the bot should appear in the channel you specified.

To test the bot, try saying:
"scot: add http://www.elvum.net/bots/ # really great GPLed Java IRC bots"
If you haven't set up the php interface yet (below!) then you can still check
everything's working by running "mysql -p scot" and typing
"SELECT * FROM SCOT;" - you should see the entry appear.

Now set up the php front end.  Copy the contents of the scotphp directory
to somewhere where your httpd will find  them (eg ~/public_html/).  Edit
queryanddisplay.inc.php and put in the username and password you defined
for the web interface earlier.  Now browse to scot.php and everything should
work!
