So, about this widgets-considered-harmful-business that Jeremy and Shelley discussed.
The obvious desperate web programmer solution is to set up a cron job that drops off a pile of XML and JSON in a cache. But that doesn’t help the 90% of people out there who don’t want to learn the shell, PHP, or JavaScript in order to run their sites.
There’s a wp-cron.php in WordPress 2.1, but there’s no documentation, and no UI for it in the admin screens. I would love to see a control panel for it that allowed you to enter some URLs that you wanted fetched and cached on a regular basis. It could even sanitize the returned data. Then you could use an XMLHTTPRequest wrapper to decorate the page with the cached data. If you were caching HTML fragments, you could set up bindings to named DIVs on the page, and use AHAH.
