<p>I have read about a technique involving writing to disk a rendered dynamic page and using that when it exists using mod_rewrite. I was thinking about cleaning out the cached version every X minutes using a cron job.</p>

<p>I was wondering if this was a viable option or if there were better alternatives that I am not aware of.</p>

<p>(Note that I'm on a shared machine and mod_cache is not an option.)</p>

You could use your cron job to run the scripts and redirect the output to a file.
If you had a php file index.php, all you would have to do is run
```
php index.php > (location of static file)
```
You just have to make sure that your script runs the same on command line as it does served by apache.