Change Blog Settings on a Joomla 1.5 Site

Have a website on Joomla 1.5. This site has a blog page. On the blog page the blog posts are displaying with the newest created displayed first. Here is what needs to be done: - Make it so that the order in which new blog articles are displayed on the Blog can be controlled through the Article Manager. - Make it so that only a few lines of the blog article are displayed and require the visitor to click to read more. I already tried changing the settings in the Menu Item Manger for the Category Blog Layout in the Parameters (Advanced) section. I changed the Primary Order to "Order" but it did not do anything to the order of how the articles are displayed on the blog page. I might have missed switching other settings.