widget customization

hi everyone,

I have a wp template I am using for one of my projects. I’m having some issues customizing one of the widget.
basically, the widget displays the post title, author and category. what I am trying to do is to have the widget show part of the actual post, a few lines at least.
here is the piece of code I’m trying to modify:

<h3>“>
<?php the_title(); ?></h3>
<p class=”meta-info”>
<?php esc_html_e(‘Posted’,’Lucid’); ?>
<?php esc_html_e(‘by’,’Lucid’);?>
<?php echo get_the_category_list(‘, ‘); ?>
<?php esc_html_e(‘in’,’Lucid’); ?>
<?php echo get_the_category_list(‘, ‘); ?>
</p>

is there a line of code I can add here to have part of my post show up in the widget? I tried adding: <?php the_post(); ?> but it kills the page entirely.

any help would be greatly appreciate it. thanks in advance.
yoshi /