What's the best way to mark "featured" posts in Jekyll?

I'd like to have a set of featured posts on my home page and at the top of my blog -- how should this be done? I think I could add a featured = true item to my yaml front matter on each featured post, but this would require me to dig through my posts and manually update each one.

Would it be easier to link to them directly with the post_url method? This would require me to either duplicate this code for the two pages or write another _include file.

Is there a standard way of handling this type of pattern?