Vince Ong

Is there such a thing? I’d like to design a homepage that is largely static save for the most recent post being pulled in

Plugin you are seeking is

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recent-posts/

Using this you can extract list of recent posts,

this is highly configurable plugin.

for demo you can see http://reena.in where before starting my posts I have pulled a list of my recent posts.