EventCalendar and the Mini Loop

Hi – I posted this query last night in the trouble-shooting forum, but didn’t get any replies. Can anyone help?

I’ve come across some problems when trying to use the Mini Loop with the EventCalendar plugin.

How do I get the mini loop on my homepage (http://www.roxburghreivers.org.uk) to exclude posts in the category used by EventCalendar? The plugin can automatically exclude this from the “big” loop, but I can’t work out what to do the mini loop. I’ve looked at the help docs on excluding categories, but can’t work out how to apply this to the mini loop.

Is there another way of achieving what I want to achieve?

I’d also like the mini loop to show the most recent posts ordered by date, not the ID – is this possible?

All help gratefully appreciated!

Cheers

Martin