Installing things NOT in portage

[podollb]

I have been a Gentoo user for several months and I really love it over all other distros I have tried in the past several years -- I am hooked. But I am now facing challanges due to the fact that I need to install things NOT in portage. HOW do I do this? I am praying that I am not stuck depending on portage to incorporate new installs.

And a secondary question would be how can I contribute (or add) to the portage repository if I want to package up something that is not in portage?

[ansient]

usually you can extract a source tarball in /usr/local/src, enter the directory and