At the moment, the Featured Article widget is hard-coded to update itself every 12 hours, which is the Nyquist frequency of a daily update. However, if the widget encounters an error while fetching the featured article (e.g. network timeout), it will take another 12 hours before trying again! It needs to update itself much faster than that, in case of an error.
Also, the general update period of 12 hours may be too long altogether, since it means that the widget can potentially be up to 12 hours "behind" the actual update to the featured article. I think we can reduce this to something like 4 hours.