[Radiant] New to Radiant and confused

[mmoulton at vt.edu]

I've done a little bit with Radiant but I haven't done much digging into the
more complex functionality.  I'm a bit confused about something though.

Looking at things like the Blog demo, is the answer to really create each post
as a child?  Isn't this going to be unwieldy when a blog has say, 3000 posts on
it?

The site I'm working on (for my High School class) is going to have a News area
with stories posted occasionally, in similar fashion to the blog demo.  I would
somewhat prefer a more simple method of adding the stories to a table, but then
it seems I would lose the ability to iterate through them as children and such.

The same idea applies with the lists of people-- I don't think having 500 child
pages, one for each person, is logical, but I'm missing the correct way to do
this, I think.

What I feel like I'm after is something that would let me iterate through a
table (with a parameter attached to filter the options), and then display each
item in a certain way, without creating a billion child pages.

Any information would be appreciated, and I apologize if this is a completely
stupid question.

Thanks,
--Mike