Theme development

I am trying to build a indexhibit style blog.

In other words, I will have a list of my most recent nodes in a block and only ONE node in the content section of the page.

This will be cake except for the fact that I want to still output my RSS feed for the last 5 (or so) nodes.

RSS feeds won't show on block views, so I can't do it that way, I'll have to figure out a way to get the RSS feed out of the page view for that single node. But how to do that?

I'm no newbie when it comes to CSS, xHTML, PHP or frameworks. I found my way around the form API and writing modules very quickly and the general documentation is very good on these topics, but now i've come to views my progress has ground to a screeching halt.

I still dont grok (understand) the drupal way of doing things.

In Drupal 5, if you decide to show a block only in one page, do that block consume any hosting resources in all the other pages??

In other words, is it really like if not visible blocks don´t exist or it does some hidden "operations" that can make your web load slower?

I ask this because in my web design I have a lot of blocks but most of them are only showed in certain pages.

Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

dear themers, I am a beginner at theming. I have a dual-language site and don't want to waste screen estate with the standard "translations" block. I just need to show the flag of the alternative language somewhere in the header. How could I modify my theme to do this?

Can someone tell me where in a theme the location of blocks is specified.

I have a template that I like but I am making quite a few changes to it so I made a new copy of the folder and renamed it to "thememodified". This way I have a backup of the original if I screw anything up to badly in the copied folder. Howerver once I have this new folder I lose the location of the blocks. The original copy of the theme I am using has about 10 differnt locations where I can add blocks but the copied folder with the new name only has 4 I think. Where is this information stored?

hey,
I thought i would post this seperate discussion in a different thread. please let me know if it wasn't a good idea to do so :)

When you guys go to create a new theme, do you

- build the template from your design in css/html, create a new drupal theme, then drop in the drupal bits (like content area, head code etc etc)

- adapt an existing theme and change the html/css to fit the layout of your new concept