Sounds very much like it. From the article:

>After each batch of new data was received from the AP, this server determined which pages needed to be re-rendered and, using the Typhoeus libcurl-multi bindings for Ruby, pulled new data for each of these pages from the render pool.

Sounds like their infrastructure already has a farm of servers set up to handle rendering articles into their HTML components, so for this scenario they would save the output as a static file and then write it to disk rather than sending the HTML out to the response / caching layer / etc.

All righty... it was just a usage of the term "flat file" I was unfamiliar with. :-)

Yeah, I think they made that up. I've only ever encountered the term "flat file" in the sense of a flat file database, such as a CSV file. As you say, pre-rendered static page is a much better name for it.

I have always used the term "static html" (as opposed to "dynamically generated html").

"Flattened files" may have been what they were meaning. "Flattened Files" would be a nice simple term for them if there wasn't confusion with Flat-file databases.

Ah! Now it makes more sense, etymology-wise and all that.

Yes. The diagram explains that their render farm takes data from AP and converts them into pages that are then sync'd with apache.