There are now RSS feeds for all blog entries by a given user: blog entries by bjorn.

You can also get feeds for each tag: blog entries tagged with "feature".

To use a static page as the front page, go to Settings > front and set the front page path to the path of the static page that you want to use.

You can use the "menu pages" setting to add entries under "Home" in the menu. Just enter a space separated list of static page paths. Currently this only works for static pages.

Hope now supports static pages, with custom paths. The Hope about page is an example of such a page.