Turning back to the automating thing and the Main Page.
I've got tired updating the Other Wikipedias section (congratulations to the Swedish Wikipedia!), so I wrote some code to automate the job.
There is a bot that updates different statistics per wiki. I decided to parse the data page and push it through a mediawiki message to avoid hard-coded pieces of text inside.
Here we have to expensive parts: getContent() for a template with necessary data, and retrieving a message for the view. Is it OK to have expensives at the Main Page?
The module is placed here: http://goo.gl/3V5St