@shawn.doughty I have a new idea about this that may work better. See my comment to Where to put boilerplate code used in templates
The idea is to just define things in a Ruby hash, and call to_json on the hash, which will return an inline string form of that hash. As long as it is not a nested hash, it appears you can add it as a value to the key value pair in a YAML map. Extra benefits include easy app specific customization using Hash#merge method.