RSS feed basics - just repeatedly overwriting the same file?

Really simple question here:

For a PHP-driven RSS feed, am I just overwriting the same 开发者_Python百科XML file every time I "publish" a new feed thing? and the syndicates it's registered with will pop in from time to time to check that it's new?

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Yes. An RSS reader has the URL of the feed and regularly requests the same URL to check for new content.

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that's how it works, a simple single xml rss file that gets polled for changes by rss readers

for scalability there there is FeedTree: collaborative RSS and Atom delivery but unlike another well known network program (bittorrent) it hasn't had as much support in readers by default

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Essentially, yes. It isn't necessarily a "file" actually stored on disk, but your RSS (or Atom) is just changed to contain the latest items/entries and resides at a particular fixed URL. Clients will fetch it periodically. There are also technologies like PubSubHubbub and pinging for causing updates to get syndicated closer to real-time.

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Yes... BUT! There are ways to make the susbcribers life better and also improve your bandwidth :) Implement the PubSubHubbub protocol. It will help any application that wants the content of the feed to be notified as soon as it's available. It'es relatively simple to implement on the publisher side as it only involves a ping.