The original poster mentioned "forums" and "writeups". In a message system with threads, replies, etc.. all going on at the same time it might be almost as much trouble to find out if an article has replies that are newer than a pretermined mark than it would be to fetch the articles themselves.

Unless, of course, it were built that way originally. From the OP's tone I gather it wasn't.

Whereas assembling a page and presenting a recent but not completely dynamic view of the data wouldn't be harmful in the case of a message board.

Using timestamps to determine if the static view should be rebuilt (or even having a background task doing it) isn't a bad strategy either if you can determine what your "timestamp" is.