for your first issue - I hacked up the following patches a few years ago (with some inspiration from Vinod Kurup if I remember correctly). Be aware that the following diffs are on my *really old* openacs installation (version 4.something).
tcl/entry-procs.tcl : http://pastebin.com/f73564119
tcl/rss-procs.tcl : http://pastebin.com/f65df6cca (lookout that this diff contains other - very nasty - hacks that will be irrelevant to you)
I won't give you my entry-chunk diff because there's all sorts of nastiness, but you need to replace relavent urls with the permalink url function in the above entry-procs diff.
Lastly you need to implement an appropriate index.vuh, something like http://pastebin.com/f44cf61
Note that this is a naive approach and one obvious limitation is that if you post two entries with the same normalised title on the same day you're going to have an issue.
Hope that saves you a bit of work and doesn't cause more confusion!
