I spent all evening setting up a new system for my ‘Currents’ on the sidebar of this site. Before, I had to go and change the html in my templates every time I wanted to change a current item. Since this was all done without Movable Type's knowledge, anything posted there in the past was lost as soon as I changed it... Not any longer. Now I've set it up so that current items are just blog posts with different categories (GBA, CD, Movie, etc) and only the most recent of each item is displayed. Also, if I want to remove an item from the list without adding another, I simply post an entry with the correct category and leave the entry body blank (this is done with a little help from the MT plugin Compare).
The really neat thing about this new setup is that the currents in the sidebar are affected appropriately on the date archive pages. So the items that show on the sidebar on June 30th will be the same shown on the June 2004 archive page months later (this already worked for the 'News' section so this aspect was free for the 'Currents').
One final thing, I changed the index.xml template so these ‘Currents’ update posts won’t show up in your RRS Aggregators. I figured the sidebar being updated wasn’t worthy enough to inform people that it had changed (I thought about this when I added the ‘News’ section as well, but figured that the news was interesting enough to syndicate).
Oh, one more thing... I added a few of my friends' blog sites to my 'Links' list. Enjoy! :)
Ok, I was wrong about the RSS stuff... I fixed RSS 2.0, but didn't fix RSS 1.0, so my aggregator showed all of the 'Currents' updates. I've just fixed the 1.0 index, and now everything looks fine.