Rather than a web app that runs and serves up content dynamically, this just spits out HTML that your webserver can serve up. No additional surface area for attack, no need for caching to keep things efficient, etc. Super simple.
I like your idea and I hope it's okay if I borrow some of your concepts for a future idea of mine ?
rewrite ^/superpacking-js-demos$ /2011-08-31_Superpacking_JS_Demos.html;Alternatively it could generate a table of redirects for you to put in your server config/htaccess.
when you edit a template or configuration, you need to regenerate entire site.
even if you blog very often, say 10 times a day, in 10 years, you only have 36k articles. Probably it shouldn't take too long to regenerate entire site for any kind of modification or addition of pages.
or, you can try to be smart and draw dependency graph (maybe using Makefile) and update what's only needed. basically you're solving caching problem, one of the hardest thing in programming.