Ohhh kay. Insomnia drove me to pound on the sidebar build problem, which I may summarize as build once, use many, in order to speed build times.
My ideal solution would be to include an MT perl-generated file into the pages at build time, but MT does not allow the user to easily set build order. Furthermore it does not offer an inbuilt file-include tag since include functionality is so easy to get via SSI and PHP. It’s not a deal-breaker.
THEREFORE, experimentally, this site is now served with SSI and server-parsed html. The old html pages will remain in place. However, their links will rot after a while, I imagine, until I can do some fancy Apache stuff to transform incoming *.html reqs into *.html reqs.
Jimmy James whould know what to say here: Guzizah! (hmmm, must search for WWJJD…)