pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

gjeffrey · 2005-12-18 16:50:35

i think i understand the reason for things being this way, but it doesn’t work well in my situation. i use textpattern to podcast (audiocrush.us) and wind up running the atom feed through feedburner because i need rss 2.0 and ideally i need a pubdate. problem has become the pubdate in the atom feed is not the pubdate, but rather the last saved date. if i make a change to an older entry, hundreds of people download a 50mb enclosure again. is there any way to change the pubdate in the atom feed to be the actual published date, and not the last saved date?

Sencer · 2005-12-18 19:30:43

The atom feed has this:

<published>2005-11-22T23:38:00Z</published>
<updated>2005-11-23T00:33:25Z</updated>

As you can see, the published date is the date that you can configure on the article-write page, and the “updated” field is, well, the last time it was updated.

A look in the spec confirms: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287

4.2.9. The “atom:published” Element
The “atom:published” element is a Date construct indicating an
instant in time associated with an event early in the life cycle of
the entry. […] *Typically, atom:published will be associated with the initial
creation or first availability of the resource.*

4.2.15 The “atom:updated” Element
The “atom:updated” element is a Date construct indicating the most
recent instant in time when an entry or feed was modified in a way
the publisher considers significant. Therefore, not all
modifications necessarily result in a changed atom:updated value. […] Publishers MAY change the value of this element over time.

Now to come back to your questions:

> is there any way to change the pubdate in the atom feed to be the actual published date, and not the last saved date?

There is no pubdate in the atomfeed. There is the attribute “published” which you can freely set in the write-tab. It is not changed automatically, but has to be manually changed once it has been saved.

My guess is that it is feedburner that you probably want to ask about “pubdate”.

gjeffrey · 2005-12-18 19:47:53

that’s incredibly insightful, thank you. i think the solution might be for me to create an RSS 2.0 template in textpattern.

zem · 2005-12-18 21:16:06

i think the solution might be for me to create an RSS 2.0 template in textpattern.

Here’s the place to help. (Basically: take the sample feed files on that page, and edit them until they’re accurate RSS 2.0 feeds).

gjeffrey · 2005-12-18 23:24:07

this does start to look like an unfortunate case where the robustness of MT or WP might win over the elegance of textpattern, since the essence of a podcast server is well-formed rss 2.0.

zem · 2005-12-19 00:00:30

this does start to look like an unfortunate case where the robustness of MT or WP might win over the elegance of textpattern, since the essence of a podcast server is well-formed rss 2.0.

That’s the spirit: rather than contribute towards a solution, shrug and wait for someone else to do it.

If you know what a well-formed RSS 2.0 feed looks like – particularly in tricky cases like these – you’re exactly the person we need.

Last edited by zem (2005-12-19 00:23:21)

gjeffrey · 2005-12-19 01:40:46

zem, that’s a bit reactionary. i’m not a developer. i’d be better suited to contributing in other ways. you don’t want me in your source.

zem · 2005-12-19 02:11:24

i’m not a developer. i’d be better suited to contributing in other ways. you don’t want me in your source.

The task doesn’t need a developer. It needs someone familiar with RSS 2.0 feeds. I’ll write the PHP code; I need someone to tell me what the XML output should look like. (The spec is, er, spectacularly unhelpful in that regard. F’rinstance: what do we do with character entities and HTML tags in the title, excerpt and body? Should we use modules like dc:date and content:encoded? Do we use the publication date or last modified date? What do we do when the excerpt and/or body are empty? etc)

gjeffrey · 2005-12-19 02:19:27

ah, i see. i’m definitely no rss 2.0 pro either. but i’ll do some legwork to see if i can find someone to help interpret. i thought alistapart.com did a writeup on their choice to go rss 2.0, but it looks to me like they might actually be hand-building their feed, as they seem to be avoiding character entities altogether. feedburner does seem to produce good feeds, even if they make odd choices when converting from one type to another. as to your specific questions, my read on the pubdate thing is that it ought to be the original publication date, not last modified.

zem · 2005-12-19 02:36:32

but i’ll do some legwork to see if i can find someone to help interpret.

Thanks. Even partial answers and pointers will help. Everything I’ve found sofar seems to come from the “just make sh*t up” department. We discussed a few possibilities in that thread, but I still don’t know which methods are preferred by feed aggregators. (Hey, I’ll even settle for “here’s how WP (or MT) does it..”)

If it helps, you can “subscribe” to the feeds in that thread using a news reader to see how well they work. (They’re not live feeds, just static files, but your news reader doesn’t know that) The actual content of each article is listed as well, in the articles.txt and articles.sql.txt files.

Last edited by zem (2005-12-19 02:50:32)

gjeffrey · 2005-12-19 02:42:06

i’m assuming http://feedvalidator.org/ wasn’t a ton of help?

zem · 2005-12-19 02:59:38

The problem is that there are any number of things we can do that are perfectly valid, and will thus get the green light from feedvalidator.org, but completely incorrect or useless. We could leave out the description and content entirely, for example, and strip all tags and entities from the title: 100% valid, easy, and, well, crap.

The mocked up RSS 2.0 feed almost validates, but it’s not useful, and looks like rubbish in most of the news readers I’ve tried.

The feed validator does try to detect encoding problems, but it’s not always correct, mostly because it can only guess what the original article content looks like.

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#1 2005-12-18 16:50:35

pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#2 2005-12-18 19:30:43

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#3 2005-12-18 19:47:53

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#4 2005-12-18 21:16:06

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#5 2005-12-18 23:24:07

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#6 2005-12-19 00:00:30

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#7 2005-12-19 01:40:46

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#8 2005-12-19 02:11:24

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#9 2005-12-19 02:19:27

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#10 2005-12-19 02:36:32

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#11 2005-12-19 02:42:06

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

#12 2005-12-19 02:59:38

Re: pubdate is atom feed is not configurable

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