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The less the better

In a recent statement (sorry, don't have the link to hand) Google's Matt Cutts indicated that 301-redirects pass the same amount of rank influence as a normal link does. So there'd be no benefit to using links instead of 301s anyway. Paul

If you can use server side programming to change the homepage, this would be better for your users and optimization.  Just be sure to expose enough content on each for Google to spider and index properly. Yes, 301 redirect the old night home page. In fact, redirect all homepage requests to just http://www.domain.com/ The canonical link can be removed if on the domain root.