I am the author of that website, and I must say that that's basically a huge mess with Makefile, Apache, Mako, Pandoc and Mercurial. ;) They served me well however, and with services like Disqus I think most personal websites can be made of static contents entirely. (Well, I do not use Disqus but I do use Tumblr with a theme synchronized to my main website.) Someday I'll try to package my solution, but that is an another story...