I really like the idea of setting a cookie that bypasses caching for a few seconds - I've heard the same technique used by Facebook, who set a cookie that ties you to the MySQL master server rather than the slave after you perform a write action so that you'll see your update without waiting for replication lag.

It relies on using the Max-Age Cookie argument though, and I was under the impression that IE doesn't implement that correctly. Anyone know what the status of IE and max-age cookies is?