I have a multisite setup with a couple of sites sharing theme files, so while it works to call the category 293 from one site and 114 from another, it would be much cleaner, and less likely to cause trouble later, if I could just have the home.php file call the posts by category name (featured)instead of ID.
This code works:
<?php query_posts('cat=293,114&showposts=1');?>
This does not(nothing returns):
<?php query_posts('category_name=featured');?>
Any idea what I'm doing wrong?