taking advantage of the hierarchical

I’ve been in the process of moving from Userland to WordPress for a while and have gotten my layout and homepage the way I want it. I wanted to change because of the support of tags, podcasting and the future, things that Userland were at the forefront of at one point but now have lagged in. Here are my questions…
1) I want to be able to have my podcasts post to the home page and then to another separate podcasting page with a unique feed. I understand the category listing and have created one, but in looking into it, the ability to take a category and have a single archive page has stumped me…

2)I have a 16 year collection of personal writing/poetry that I am porting over as single pages/permalink type posts and would like to create a friendly directory page for them with links arranged by year and date. This is a big hang up for me as I’ve always wanted the directory structure to be simple to navigate but also wanted single files for each.