Customize Home Page left column blog excerpts?

[pattyayers]

Hello People,

On the Home Page (in the Allure theme), in the left column, there are short blog post excerpts. (I'm *not* using the Feature Box plugin.)

I would like to do two things:

(1) display the date of each post, probably just beneath the post title, and
(2) at the end of the excerpt, I'd like to display the words "READ MORE", and have them link to the full blog post page.

I'm fine with editing code - I tried and wasn't able to figure out how to do either of these things. I did search the forum too. Thanks very much in advance for any help! :-)

P@tty