Featuerd gobal posts – am I trying to re-invent the wheel?

I’m trying to create a home page for my multisite (subfolders install).

I’d like a couple of divs at the top where I can show excerpts of recent sitewide posts, selected by category. I also need to be able to style, control image size and excerpt length.

So far I’ve used the sitewide tags plugin to pull posts onto the home site. I then created 3 new widget areas, added the golbal recent posts to these, and used the “widgets on pages” to add these 3 featured categories to my home page.. still with me??

It works, but my question is – I feel I’m trying to re-invent the wheel. There MUST be a simpler or better way to achieve what I’m trying to do ie. have 3 recent network posts on my home page, that I can select the category and resize the image & excerpt to suit my needs.

Any advice on this most welcome!