MichaelH

I’d consider creating a new category, then changing the default post category to that new category.

One example:

<?php
//get terms (category ids 11,2,33,34), then display one post in each term
$taxonomy = 'category';//  e.g. post_tag, category
$param_type = 'category__in'; //  e.g. tag__in, category__in
$term_args=array(
  'include' => '11,2,33,34',
  'orderby' => 'name',
  'order' => 'ASC'
);
$terms = get_terms($taxonomy,$term_args);
if ($terms) {
  foreach( $terms as $term ) {
    $args=array(
      "$param_type" => array($term->term_id),
      'post_type' => 'post',
      'post_status' => 'publish',
      'posts_per_page' => 1,
      'caller_get_posts'=> 1
      );
    $my_query = null;
    $my_query = new WP_Query($args);
    if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
      echo 'Latest Post in '.$taxonomy .' '.$term->name;
      while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
        <p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></p>
       <?php
      endwhile;
    }
  }
}
wp_reset_query();  // Restore global post data stomped by the_post().
?>

I didn’t find that doing a google search so maybe it is cached by Yahoo, but that topic NO LONGER EXISTS so not sure you can do anything but contact Yahoo about that.

Here’s the link if you don’t believe it:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/please-helpsite-is-not-found-when-search-for-using-google#post-1759369

Try

$cat_id = get_cat_ID('whateveryourcategory');
wp_list_bookmarks('category='.$cat_id);

Not sure what you mean by ‘set’, but what about:

$args=array(
  'meta_key' => 'your_custom_field',
  'meta_value' => 'your_custom_value',
  'meta_compare' => '!=",
  'post_type' => 'post',
  'post_status' => 'publish',
  'posts_per_page' => -1,
  'caller_get_posts'=> 1
);
$my_query = null;
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);

Note: wonder what happened to my first response to this thread?

<?php
//echo "<pre>"; print_r($wp_query->query_vars); echo "</pre>";
$author = get_query_var('author');
echo get_author_posts_url( $author );
?>

The article, The Loop, has one example styling posts differently.

Also see: http://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+style+first+post+differently