Thanks for the quick reply, kathrynwp. I've looked at the topic and don't think it's what I'm aiming for. I'm not talking about a widget or recent posts. I'm looking for a way to show 5 or 6 posts in a slider (I'm using the Selecta theme, which has a great one), but I don't want those posts to be visible in the "regular" list of posts [is there a name for that?].
I want to keep them separate because they will be "how-to" posts describing ways to use and search my blog. I've put a category of "sticky" on each of them, and set up my category cloud to exclude "sticky" posts, so they don't show up there, but when people browse all my posts, they are visible there.
I tried setting up the posts as both sticky and private, but that doesn't work. Is there a way to limit posts to a certain date? If that's so, I could pre-date them to before that time.
Any ideas would be great. I'm not a newbie, but I'm not very experienced in this. Thanks. : )