Your solution is quite nice and probably as simple as site generators get, but I was thinking of using php just for some simple includes etc. Here's my inspiration post which explains what I'm after, and why generators in general are not the solution (for me): http://ankarstrom.se/~john/articles/html2/
So you can edit your HTML push and have a simple script to clean it before publishing it.
You can copy my blog is very simple and is generated with PHP
https://github.com/4lb0/blog