There's a nice little tutorial here which I referred to, IMO this would be a good start.
Take a good look at those lines.
maximum_width 400 -> changing the
number to 200 will result in a smaller
conky file, increasing to 500 will
cause conky to be wider.
alignment top_right -> this tells
conky to be at the top right of the
screen.
If you put bottom_left conky will be
on the bottom left, and so on.
gap_x 10 -> increasing this number or
decrease it to have a wider/smaller
gap on the x axis of the screen
gap_y
10 -> increasing this number or
decrease it to have a wider/smaller
gap on the y axis of the screen
default_color gray -> this seems
pretty obvious, replace gray with
another color.
To get a list of colors, open this
file in a browser or text editor:
file:///usr/share/X11/rgb.txt
Conky will be able to use 99% of those
colors.
A list of all those things and what
they do can be found here.
Adding things to conky
If you know run conky, you will not
see anything.
You are going to need to add things to
it.
Under the previously pasted text, put
this
TEXT
Now, everything under TEXT will be
visible on your desktop.
To add plain text, just type
something. It will appear on your
desktop.
You’ll find a list of variables here.
If you find a variable you would like
to use, put them in your file like
this:
$variable
An example would be
$membar
This will give you a bar with the
amount of ram memory is used on your
pc