There is one more question that I had; Is there a way to shorten the archive list so that it doesn't show every single month you have posted?

Thanks again!

The Fresh and Clean theme is designed to display excerpts only on the front page. if you don't want to choose another theme there is a workaround you can use to override that.

The theme has an active excerpt box below the editor. You compose your whole post first but before you publish it you switch to the Text (HTML) editor, copy the code, paste it into the Excerpt box, ad then publish the post. http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/excerpts/#creating-excerpts This must be done on every post.

Fresh and Clean theme description > http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/fresh-and-clean/
Fresh and Clean live demo site > http://freshandcleandemo.wordpress.com/

The post slider appears on the front page if and only if you set featured images of the size required by the theme and mark them as sticky posts. Featured Image at least 840 pixels wide.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/featured-images/#setting-a-featured-image
http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-visibility/#sticky-posts

The post slider on the Fresh and Clean theme is not designed to automatically advance. http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/features/post-slider/

Setting a Featured Image
Open the editor of the post or page where you want to display a unique custom header image, and locate the Featured Image module in the bottom right corner under Page Attributes. Click Set featured image.
If you don’t see the Featured Image module on your Add New or Edit Post page, please make sure you’ve selected Featured Image in your Screen Options. http://en.support.wordpress.com/screen-options

Much more manual than I had hoped, but sometimes that's how the cookie crumbles.

Thanks,
-Doug

I am attempting to show post summaries (only) when showing a page of posts on the front of my blog, or when viewing all the posts in a particular category. I selected the Reading option to show summaries in the post feeds, but it didn't change anything.

Any advice would be appreciated.

However, this does NOT reflect on my Home page and a full text of each post still appears on Home page.

@tanialeong - Just to clarify, are you saying that changing under Settings>Reading the "For each article in a feed, show" settings to "Summary" changed the full posts on your front page to short posts with a "continue reading" link? If so, that is a major change to how the site works.

Or did you add the "More" tag or "Excerpts" to each of your posts?

Your theme, Fresh & Clean supports custom excerpts on the Main posts page and Category/Archive pages. This means you can choose which photo appears, which text, and how the excerpt is formatted (colored background or text etc.). The text doesn't have to be the first few lines of a post.

This custom excerpt will appear in your RSS feed as well as in emailed subscriptions. I believe that using the custom excerpt module with any theme will work for these feeds as well: you can choose a photo to go out in your feed.

Note: I have not tried using custom excerpts in all themes, but the ones I've experimented with: yes, they function in feeds.
Also Note: Embeds and shortcodes won't work in custom excerpts.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/excerpts/
More detailed information here:
http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/the-excerpt-function/

I currently have new posts publish to a blog page, and use the 'more' tag to make them shorter.

Here's a link to the blog page > http://jamesborrell.co.uk/blog/

I also write custom excerpts and much prefer these, at the moment I manually put them on my home page which looks nicer but is time consuming...

Link > http://jamesborrell.co.uk/

Is there a way of making the blog page display my custom excerpts? I searched a lot of sites for an answer, but it mostly comes up with .org information, which is a bit beyond me I'm afraid.

Alternatively, is there a way of making my home page automatically retrieve each custom excerpt when I publish.

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Thanks,

James

excerpts won't work on pages: only on posts

If you don't see the excerpt module on your 'edit page' then click 'screen options' in the upper right of your screen to display it.

Write up the custom summary you want, including the picture/pictures. In html editor, copy the code for your excerpt, paste it into the excerpt module, and save draft or update post.