Regarding your PHP 'tip', that kinda makes the whole point of using a static generator in the first place a bit useless.
And when you decide to do it anyway, configure your apache (or whatever you like) to parse .html as php.
I'm sure open to suggestions though.
Thanks for the tip on configuring Apache... I may look into that next time. I've got my .htaccess set to rewrite the urls to extensionless, so it didn't make too much of a difference.