Well, not sure about qiestion 1, but I just tried an experiment here on the shelving.
Not being quite sure what type of shelving you want, I came up with an approach that would assign a recipe to a shelf based on the recipe name.
Add a custom column to calibre as follows
Code:
Lookup name: newsshelf
Column Heading: News Shelf
Column Type: Column built from other columns
Template: {:'strcmp(list_intersection(field('tags'), 'News', ','),'News','',list_item(field('title'),0,'['),'')'}
What the column is doing is looking for entries with the
News tag, and then returning the value of title excluding the date info. On the news articles I tesetd, their title was always of the form
Recipe Name [date run].
Then, just add the value
#newsshelf to the list of column in either the Kobo Touch or Kobo Extended driver (depending on which one you are using to send data to the Kobo).