beginner questions

I've got a couple beginner-level questions regarding problems I've run
into just setting up a simple blog as a learning exercise.

First, is there any way to do mod_rewrite-style redirects from within
Helma? I've got people subscribed to my feed at the old location, and
it would be nice to be able to redirect based on arbitrary rules
instead of having to set up such an object hierarchy just for the
purposes of redirecting a single URL. Also this would help with
permalinks a lot.

Secondly, is it OK to mount a static repository on top of a code one?
Ideally I would like to have it check for static files first, then
fall through to dynamic handling if nothing's found. This would clean
up my url scheme since I'd rather not change all my past entries to
match the helma convention of keeping all my static stuff under
/static/ but rather have /images, /stylesheets, and /javascript. Is
the right thing to do there just to have a separate static mountpoint
for /images, etc?

thanks,
Phil Hagelberg

http://technomancy.us <= recently ported to helma