I used a shell script for that, but vaguely thought of changing to a Makefile for a while, and finally did now, thanks to the article reminding of that; it is more appropriate. Though the shell script still invokes make, and then rsync, since rsync seems less appropriate for a Makefile. But now it synchronizes fewer files.

As a side note, I am quite happy with XSLT templates to produce the pages (instead of attaching a static header, as in the article), as well as to generate indexes and an Atom feed.