SITUATION

So if you look to your right on this page, you'll see one or two sidebars with posts. (Featured & Latest)

I spent hours making that work and was often scratching my head because no matter what I tried, it just wouldn't work. And that didn't make sense since the theme this blog is built with comes with this nifty sidebar feature.

After checking the theme code over and over again I stumbled upon the answer by mere chance. It turns out that Ghost offers extra functionality using something called a {{get}} helper. This is something new and below I include an extract from Ghost support docs:

In Ghost 0.7.2 we have added a first ‘beta’ version of API access, which gives you access to the new {{get}} helper and the embeddable ghost.url.api() helper for making ajax requests. This can be enabled via a checkbox on the labs page in your Ghost admin panel. See screenshot: Ghost Beta Features Public API

Don't make the same mistake I did so make sure to enable this functionality BEFORE you play around with themes as they may need it to make certain expected functionality work.

Reference Links:
http://support.ghost.org/public-api-beta
http://themes.ghost.org/docs/recent-featured-sidebar