onseduction

I think the excerpt must be within the loop. Though you probably can use some global for it.

I’m almost sure you use the tinymce editor. Problem is, it messed up. It inserted paragraphs where it shouldn’t, or maybe you tried to correct things and the editor misunderstood what you were trying to do. I think the best for you is to disable the fancy editor and use the good old one (as I do).

You could add a post counter into the loop. Eg: before the loop you set $i=0 and in the loop $i++. Then depending on the value of $i (in your case when $=1) do something with it.

edit: like kafkaeski said faster

.post a:hover {
font-weight: bold;
}

And change it to:

.post a:hover {
font-weight: underline;
}

or

.post a:hover {
font-weight: none;
color: #ff0000;
}

or something like that.

Personally I would change the link hovers. If you hover over a link it gets styled bold, but that moves the text next to it.

Maybe you could put that text in span tags?

I think you would have to do this through a plugin.

Maybe you can use the links page in you wp-admin to do that. You can define an image for a link there.