Adding Recent Posts with thumbnail and excerpt to twenty twelve homepage

Hello all,

I have finally managed to display posts on my homepage without a plugin using Alchymyth’s http://www.transformationpowertools.com/wordpress/page-of-posts-template-for-twenty-twelve.

This is the project i am working on: http://www.makewpwebsites.com/

I changed the ‘category_name’ => ‘antiquarianism’ to ‘orderby’ => ‘date’ and this organises my posts by most recent. Great!

However the titles do not display at the top of each article. How do i do this? (I would like them to be permalinked to the article post itself)

I would like to display the first 50 words of the article and not the whole article content. How can i achieve this?

I would also like to display the author, time of post, number of comments and the categories the article is attached to. Any ideas? (I would like these to be displayed directly under the title)

I know I have asked a lot of questions but any guidance you could provide me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

James