Can you make a single post featured with normal blog home

[pmontero]

Hello,

I am looking to modify the News Theme (currently using News 2.1) to have the home page be more like a normal blog page showing the most recent posts in chronological order but would still like to have a single blog post featured at the top (possibly formatted differently) in case I would like to draw attention to that specific blog post despite other more recent posts being added. Here are my questions - hoping someone can help:

1 - I found another post in the forum indicating that if I simply copy the contents of archive.php to home.php I can make the home page be like a normal blog home. That worked great but is there any way to control how many posts it shows on this page before giving the NEXT PAGE link at the bottom? The default seems to show 10 posts - can I make it 5 or 7?

2 - I would like to still have a single post chosen as a FEATURED POST at teh top of the page that remains until I choose new FEATURED POST. This would allow me to draw attention to a specific post or event despite posting other new content. Is there a way to do this now that I have gotten rid of the tabber section on the home page? I have looked for plugins to do this but can't seem to find one that does the trick.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions anyone can provide with this.

All the best,
Phil

BTW - My blog is at http://www.theanywhereoffice.com if you need to see it to see how I currently have it formatted.