Nice but limited

This could be a perfect plugin. Unfortunately, it lacks some basic functionality like excluding particular posts by their IDs. That is a big one for me. There is also no option to position the titles.

The plugin is somewhat buggy. When “Limit to category” is selected, it ignores the number of posts to show. Also it is not clear to me what offset does (“the number of posts to skip”). It would make sense to skip the most recent posts but it does not work this way.