You mean how can you control whether articles, pages or stories appear, other than manually selecting them to be published on the front page? You could enable the alternate front page in Views and add a filter to filter by content type...or do you mean the RSS?

I figured it out thanks to your reply - thanks

I'm having trouble switching back to the default view for the homepage - it's failing when I disable the alternate view for the homepage.

Can you provide me with the exported view for the Amoeba demo? I can't seem to get mine to display the first full paragraph.

If you're having a problem with the paragraph in the slideshow, it's likely because there's hidden markup or a space preceeding it. If you're using a WYSIWYG editor, disable it and check for any extra paragraph tags. Also, with the front page - did you remember to change Configuration > Site Information to reflect the new front page?