Online Magazine Table of Contents

Online magazines like Slate and the new Seed Magazine usually have short descriptions of articles on the front page. How do you get blog software like Movable Type to do this? The developers of the Seed site provide some hints, but is there a quick and natural way to display microcontent in sidebars?

Let's say you want short descriptions of new content running down the right sidebar, a new content blog that is displayed on the front page in addition to the main blog running down the center column.

Let's say this new content blog is updated everyday, then to avoid link rot you need to only keep one day's worth of new content in this blog (or use permalinks after the first day), otherwise the link to an article will point to the top of the page, not the article.

Separate little boxes running down the right sidebar would be better, but that's not a blog.