You need a little global that will generate the category list each time you start the build, and write it to a file, like category_sidebar.inc using a template, category_sidebar.html
Once that file is written, you just include it, into the templates you want. The reason you want to do it that way, is the file is parsed/generated only once per build (it never changes) and the only time it _would_ change is between builds, so you generate it once, at the start.
It's harder to do for dynamic pages, and someone asked that a day or so ago. Process is similar, you just need to figure out a "flag" to recompile the include file each time you change your category layouts.
I do that on
http://postcards.com, but only with the top-level categories (and the reconstructed template set doesn't carry the list into the sub pages, but all I have to do is add <%include category_sidebar.inc%> and it will add that to each page.
Several suggestions (almost 2 years old, if I remember) were offered by different people on how to generate a list of categories and subcategories.
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