Dynamically Created Top Articles List in Django?
If you do something like sort by top views, it would be fast if you index the view column in the DB.  Another option is to only collect the top x articles every hour or so, and toss that value into Django's cache framework.  
The nice thing about caching the list is that the algorithm you use to determine top articles can be as complex as you like without hitting the DB hard with every page view.  Django's cache framework can use memory, db, or file system.  I prefer DB, but many others prefer memory.  I believe it uses pickle, so you can also store Python objects directly. It's easy to use, recommended.
I'm creating a Django-powered site for my newspaper-ish site. The least obvious and common-sense task that I have come across in getting the site together is how best to generate a "top articles" list for the sidebar of the page. 
The first thing that came to mind was some sort of database column that is updated (based on what?) with every view. That seems (to my instincts) ridiculously database intensive and impractical and thus I think I'd like to find another solution.
Thanks all.