Anybody a good coder?

I'm looking for a daily/hourly update strategy... How do you do this?

I'm building my own link-list type thing for my own use and I've got it setup for "random" in some categories, others are static.

What I'd like to do is arrange an hourly/daily or some other periodic update but I'm not sure how to approach this.

My thoughts:
1) A cron-type job creates the page automatically
2) The list page checks the creation date when it loads and if the time-frame is past, it generates a new page
3) I rip apart an existing list and see what it does

I'm not looking for actual code, just some strategy ideas. I'm using PHP but can adapt from some other language with some work.

Thanks in advance...