As suggested above by yacoubean, to complete the solution you can have the "makeHTML.pl" script run nightly to make sure that your static page is up to date. Obviously you can set this update interval to any time period you like. Even if you do it as often as hourly your users will enjoy the benefit of a very fast static page.

On Unix the scheduler is called "cron" and the schedule to run things is called a crontab. The command crontab -e will allow you to edit your personal crontab entries. You'll want to set up an ENV var for your visual editor before you run crontab -e (read the man page for details).

Merrry Xmas