A neat little way to show hot articles

There was a sudden jump in traffic these few days to an announcement of a particular financial product. Most of the traffic are directed at a few articles relating to that financial product. Hence, I brain stormed on how I could maximise the exposure of these articles.

A few ideas come to mind. 

1) Make the posts sticky. As an aggregator, new posts come in thick and fast. Making these posts sticky even for a few days will give the impression that no new articles have been added.

2) Highlighting the post. Seems messy since readers will be scrolling down and wondering what those highlighted post are. Furthermore, once new posts are published, the highlighted posts will be push back.

After some thought, the text widget is probably the best way to achieve my goal. However the default text widget is too plain and I wanted it to stand out. After some "Google-ing", I found the answer - Fancy Text Widget. It's not listed in WordPress plugin because it is not free. However, you can still download it for free. One way is to download the demo version. I think it's exactly the same as the full version just fewer images or you can download for free in wpsale (I stumble upon this accidentally). This free version contains more images than the demo but it is only version 1. The latest version is just one update newer and this free version is working nicely so no complains.