The right-hand sidebar on the front page of this site features recent headlines from other sites I manage. This is accomplished using a macro in Conversant that reads the RSS feeds from those sites and then displays the two most recent posts on the weblogs there.
Which is cool, except it used to cause the page to load slowly when it was time to update the RSS feeds (which the macro did every hour).
So when the discussion on the Conversant support board veered to talking about RSS, I mentioned that it would be nice to be able to change the length of the feed cache.
Well, it didn’t take long until not only was that possible, but a feature was added so that the results of the entire macro itself could be cached. The upshot is that now the text of the headlines here only changes every six hours which means the front page now loads much faster than it used to.
Good stuff. And it may load even faster once we do a server upgrade currently schedule for May.