[Tutor] need help planning website updates

[Jay Loden]

I have a sort of simple CMS system on my website made from a conglomeration of 
scripts.  On the left column, I want to add a feature that shows the last 
five items updated (only html & exe files in the /var/www/html/ for example) 
directory that I have updated, with each item as a link to the page. You can 
see what this is supposed to look like at http://jayloden.com (right now it's 
being done by hand)

I've been thinking of having a crontab run a Python script, which logs checks 
a file with something along the lines of: 

file.foo = 12:20-1/20/05

for each file, containing the date and time the file was last modified.  Then 
I would have the crontab script check the date in the file versus the dates 
on the current files, and if the current files have been updated, to add them 
to the html on the side of the page.  I have no trouble setting up the 
crontab, or editing the html template for my page (it's all created from php 
on the fly) but I wanted to know if I am going about this a semi-intelligent 
and/or efficient way, or if there is some incredibly better way that I could 
do this with Python.  For example, is there some other way to notify my 
script that a file has been modified, rather than run a crontab a couple 
times an hour.  Is there maybe a better way to store and check dates, etc. 

Thanks!
-Jay