After the problems yesterday (and what would beta software be without a few problems?), I decided to start rolling out the caching system.

Caching keeps a copy of the content closer to the web server, so we don't have to go querying the database on the back end every time we want that content.

The trick is to make sure that we clear out the relevant cached document every time the data in that document has changed.

I wanted to start with something that changes relatively infrequently. So I rolled out caching for the sidebar content only.

If it seems to be working fine, then I'll try rolling it out for some of the other content, too.