CoPress

The Nieman Journalism Lab has a pretty slick featured posts widget at the top of their sidebar I'm thinking about duplicating:

It probably wouldn't be an exact copy, so here's part of what I'm thinking:

• A widget that you could install in your widget enabled sidebar (what Nieman has may or may not be an actual widget)
• Ability to set a title or leave the title blank
• Set featured posts (and I suppose even featured pages) by separating the post IDs with commas in a text field
• Number of posts featured is determined by the number of post IDs you have in the text field, as is order
• Ability to choose whether one post or two are featured. In the image above, I would interpret that to be two featured posts. One featured post would just be a larger image. You can also set the custom field that the plugin should draw images from, as well as the width of the image (so you can resize images appropriately)

Would this be of use or interest to anyone else?

Exactly what I was going to suggest, though I think Daniel likes the idea of being able to change the order so they don't display chronologically.