Private Post, Default Theme Questions

Hi, I have three questions and would really appreciate it if someone could answer them.

1) Instead of using the password-protect feature for a post, is there anyway to make it truely private so that people can’t even see you’ve made a new entry? (cause right now, a new entry with the title: Protect: *entry title* appears)

2) Is there anyway to make a category post NOT show up in the main page? For instance, I put an entry under “little rabbit”. I want people to be able to see the entry ONLY if they click on my category link on the sidebar. I don’t want the entry to appear in my main page

3) how do u make the archive SHORTER in the default blue theme for wordpres? Right now I have a huge list of achives all to way back to like November 2005. The list is way too long…how do i make it so that it only shows archive from the past…3 months for example.

Thanks!