This is the sort of problem which on the surface seems so simple, but where the immediate solution is so wasteful, and can indeed be hard to pull off; my side project Oversigter has been doing this incorrectly for years.
The solution is elegant, although it can be difficult to pull off in practice if you don’t have a lot of control over your hosting environment, as I don’t where Oversigter is hosted.
Via Simon Willison
No one wants to invest countless hours in a losing technology… you want to learn something that will be useful in the long run. I have just the skill for you, and it doesn’t matter what language you work with.
Learn to write well.
This is exactly why I want to study English at university, and not something like Computer Science, or other things specifically related to what I want to work with. This also points out a deeper thing about me as a software developer: I am not that much into mathematics. I appreciate it on a simple level, and I do not avoid applying mathematics to my programming, but I am just more interested in communication. This I probably one of the reasons I started working with the Web, and stuck with it. (The other of course being, that when you start out as a 12 year old doing programming, HTML is just a bit easier to grasp.) I am not one of those who want to solve the performance bits of a program, making it run n% faster by tweaking some engine using clever natural science; I am one of those who want to write software that helps people communicate.