I would like a white middle part with slight transparency that shows my background image through and then solid image at the sides.

Can someone help!

I would like to have the image link to the rest of the post. I know I can just highlight the photo and link it to the post url while writing the post, but I only want this to work when you are on the main page. When you are inside the post, I want clicking on the image to take you to the image url, instead of refreshing the post again. Is there any way to do this? hope I explained it well.

thanks!

On a side note, as I was googling this topic, I stumbled upon some random forum threads where it says it's bad for google to have invisible content/tags and you could get penalized. Do you know if that's true and what does it mean?

thanks again!

.tag-links {
display: none;
}

I want to use tags in my Reddle theme blog but I would like to hide them if possible. I don't mind if they come at the end of the post after the jump break or are just hidden altogether, I just don't want them on the main page. Can anyone help me with this? I have the CSS upgrade.

Thanks!

Can I change the icon that is used or the colour of it?

Here is an example you can start with:

.comments-link a {
	background: teal;
}
.comments-link a:before {
	border-color: transparent transparent transparent teal;
}

Change "teal" to a color code of your choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#X11_color_names

Also on the front page of my blog the summaries of my blogs appear with a black background behind the summary text. How do I change this?

I used the built in browser web inspector to find all of the selectors that adjust those colors, made a big list of them, and applied one set of color changes to everything I found. You can use this as a starting point:

.indexed .format-image .entry-image,
.indexed .format-image .entry-header,
.indexed .format-image .entry-summary,
.indexed .format-image .entry-summary a,
.indexed .format-image .entry-title a:hover,
.indexed .format-image .entry-title a:focus,
.indexed .format-image .entry-title a:active,
.indexed .format-image .taxonomy-links,
.indexed .format-image .edit-link,
.indexed .format-image .taxonomy-links a:hover,
.indexed .format-image .taxonomy-links a:focus,
.indexed .format-image .taxonomy-links a:active,
.indexed .format-image .edit-link a:hover,
.indexed .format-image .edit-link a:focus,
.indexed .format-image .edit-link a:active {
	background: #fff;
	color: #444;
}

Adjust the colors as needed. If you want to adjust colors for individual elements, pull them out into separate CSS blocks.

I would like to adjust the format of my Reddle themed blog. Ideally I would like my main content area to be wider and my sidebar area to be narrower. How do I do this?

Check out this previous reply on another thread:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/reddle-how-to-change-content-width?replies=13#post-1177585

I would ideally like to have any comments made on my blogs to be automatically published to a linkedin group

I'm not sure if it's helpful since you mentioned comments, but you can automatically publish posts (not comments) to LinkedIn and that might be something you're interested in. See this help page for details and examples:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/publicize/

Also I would ideally like to have any comments made on my blogs to be automatically published to a linkedin group - is this possible on the free wordpress hosted option?

No

Also I would ideally like to have any comments made on my blogs to be automatically published to a linkedin group - is this possible on the free wordpress hosted option?

Also on the front page of my blog the summaries of my blogs appear with a black background behind the summary text. How do I change this?

And finally, I find the comments icon to be not clearly identifiable enough. I have had several users send me emails about not being able to see the comments icon. Can I change the icon that is used or the colour of it?

.fixed.secondary #page, .fixed #page, #page {
    width: 1120px;
}

What you might have to do is to search through the existing CSS and look for anyplace there is a "max width" declaration, or anyplace where widths are shown as percentages and then change those all to static, fixed widths by adding the appropriate declarations.

There is also some of the responsive stuff that I believe is set in the theme PHP script files and in a couple instances I wasn't able to get an entire theme to go fixed. Some elements still responded to browser width.

I am using the Reddle theme on my blog but it is a floating design, so when you make your browser window smaller the content shrinks with it. I would like to change it to fixed, if possible but I am a total CSS newbie and have no idea how to do that, can anyone help me?

I'm not sure if you need this, but this is what I currently have in my CSS sheet, it is just to make my content a little wider and the widget area a little smaller than the original theme plus some other minor changes:

#site-title {
border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;
display: inline-block;
font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif;
font-size: 52px;
font-size: 5.2rem;
line-height: 1.15;
padding: 0 2.954209748892% .275em;
}

#main .widget-area {
float: right;
margin-right: 7%;
width: 25%;
}

.secondary #content {
margin: 0 38% 0 7%;
}

footer .permalink,
.image-attachment #content footer .permalink {
margin-left: 58px;
}

Thanks for your help!!

.widget_blog_subscription input[type="submit"] {
background: #B12930;
color: #FFFFFF;
}

I notice you have not entered any description or title in the subscribe widget, and right now it is confusing. People will not likely realize that they have to enter their email address in the long field above the button. I would suggest entering something for the logged in WordPress.com and non-WordPress.com users.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/follow-blog-widget/

thanks for all your help!!