server: $ mkdir /www/pages/project $ cd /www/pages/project $ hg init
localhost: $ cd /path/to/your/project $ hg init $ hg add * $ hg commit -m "message" $ hg push ssh://usr:pwd@123.123.123.123//www/pages/project
afterward it's just the localhost (ignore "$ hg init")
hg qpop -a ; hg pull ; hg update $1 ; hg qpush -a
The $1 is a branch or tag argument given to the Bash script. That way you can easily specify a particular version to update to (or rollback to!) on the command line.
The qpop and qpush will rebase any MQ patches you've made, e.g. local configuration changes, hacks, etc.
More on rebasing applied patches with Mercurial: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbookch12.html#x16-28900012.8
Heck, I use sshfs to mount my blog as a directory & edit files directly. rsync has also worked nicely for me in the past. But then, these are all sites that I either don't care about source control, or don't have git/hg available on the shared server.