Hello. Help -- Why are excerpts not showing?

Hello everyone.

I am trying to add categories and search to the top of my blog, but I am unable to add any blocks to my blog page for some reason, only more blog posts. Any tips on that would be great.

So, in my quest, I tried to make a custom page that includes an embedded blog via a summary block and a tag cloud above it showing just the categories instead. However, my summary block doesn't actually show the post content when I click the slider to show excerpt. All that does is show "read more -->".  Any tips for how to make this work or simply how to add navigation and search to my blog much appreciated. I've scoured the internet and it seems silly that this common task is quite difficult.

See image of example I was working on with missing blog text:

Thanks.

Thank you! I didn't realize excerpts were separate from the content in the blog post.

I took a look at your site and see that it is quite customized.