Another great article, Ian. As a newbie to Backbone, I find myself refactoring and going over best practices frequently. One of the first things I found myself trying to wrap my head around is different ways to render my templates properly. This seems like a good approach when you have pretty distinct modular chunks that are reusable.

Rivets does look promising in that there are some parts of my code in templates that are just a single number (say # of notifications). That's a pain to have to separate out into a separate view or render function for something so small.