Story Ordering

I am creating a menu system by querying for all stories from
a given
category.  I then place each story in a menu. I would like
to have some
control over how the stories are ordered in the menu.

The two methods I'm toying with for solving this are:

   - adding another form element to the story element type
that includes
   an order number field
   - changing the menu system so I have to manually add
articles to the
   menu

Is there some magical way to solve this problem that I'm
missing?

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