Recent posts on all pages

I’ve done a few searches and almost came close to finding what i needed in this thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/58233 but it doesn’t do what I am hoping to be able to do.

I’m working on a site that unusually won’t have a lot of blog updates – I’m more keen to use WP as the backend for it’s page handling and general niceness..

The bulk of my content will end up being articles and not news/blog posts – so what I want to be able to do is to have a column (basically a menu) that has the latest 2 or 3 (or more) full news posts. This column/menubar will exist on all pages, with the main content area of the page showing an article or gallery or whatever.

I tried just pasting the code in that shows off the news/blog posts into this column, which worked on the main page, but when I went and viewed a blogpost, the current story/post was the only one showing in the menu column.

Using the code posted in that thread I mentioned before, I managed to get the post topics showing, but I just need to expand upon that a bit and have the content of the post showing (or at the very least the excerpt).

It’s probably a simple addition to that database query, but my knowledge of things like that are limited (to about nothing)..

If anyone can offer some help, I’d appreicate it muchly!

thanks
justin