Recent Articles on External Pages

Typical scenario: I want to provide a list of recent wordpress articles on pages outside of wordpress. I’ve already read through http://wordpress.org/support/topic/75485, http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop, and http://wordpress.org/support/topic/73570, and I also realize that I should be able to implement an RSS tool to accomplish the same thing.

All that said, here’s my real question: if 90% of my pages are outside of wordpress, and this “Recent Articles” list will be on all of those pages, isn’t it excessive overhead to process all this (whether via the Loop or an RSS script) with each page load? In other CMS’s I have been able to generate a static page with the publishing of each article, and then simply display that static page in my template with a php include. I hate to draw comparisons, but it sure seems like a relatively easy solution and much less process-intensive. Any suggestions? Or am I a dolt and it’s already easily-implementable? 🙂

Thanks.