In the same way that you mark gmail posts with a star, you can also star typo articles that you consider quite good and that should always have a spot in the front page. Instead of using a static sidebar and add the links, you just mark the article with the star, and the sidebar gets updated immediately.

I already have this functionality working on my blogs, but before submitting the patch I thought I'd gather feedback here for possible enhancements. The only drastic change needed is adding the boolean field in the content table.