I think most of us have all made our fair share of mistakes, the biggest mistake is to not learn from them. Don't beat yourself up too bad, you're looking for help in the right place and sometimes the excitement just gets the best of us.
In a nutshell the yellow liquid that hardened like a rock sounds like your humidity was too high. I had similar results with some chicks years ago. You want to lose 13% of the eggs initial weight throughout incubation. You can do this by monitoring air cell size or by getting a digital scale...