Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

kiplet · 2006-08-16 18:27:39

I have a litblog, the City of Roses, that’s a mix of traditional publish-as-it’s-posted bloggy content and content that’s been preloaded to publish at specific later dates at regular intervals. I originally had a Feedburner feed pointed to the standard txp atom feed. Bloggy posts updated per usual.

This Monday, the first postdated post was supposed to appear at 1.30ish Pacific Daylight Savings Time. Although it was listed properly in both the atom and rss feeds, it wasn’t showing up at Feedburner. I posted a bloggy post, and Feedburner picked that up, and at that time also picked up the postdated post.

Examining the Feedburner feed (which was reading the atom feed), I discovered they list the “posted” date as the update date, not the published date. After a little confab with tech help at Feedburner, we decided maybe the fact that the update date was earlier than the published date was causing the confusion, and they agreed that offering an option as to which date should be selected from the atom feed was a good idea. Until they do offer this option, I decided it would be better to point the Feedburner feed at txp’s rss feed instead. I don’t use the bells and whistles, after all, just a simple excerpt and a link back, so I wasn’t really losing anything, and since there’s no date information, there’s no chance for “confusion.”

The second postdated post was supposed to appear this morning at, again, about 1.30ish PDT. It shows up in both the rss and atom feeds just fine, but again, Feedburner doesn’t see it. I’ve got an email in to them asking what’s up, but I thought I’d post here and see if anyone had any ideas.

I haven’t yet been able to try viewing the feeds through other readers besides Bloglines. What’s interesting there: Bloglines sees the new postdated post just fine in the rss feed, but it can’t see the new post in the atom feed.

So there appears to be an issue with postdated posts in an atom feed, in that an update date earlier than a published date causes (maybe?) some “confusion” that prevents two reasonably popular feed reading tools from registering the postdated post as new content to be added. (Maybe?)

Additionally, there appears to be a conflict at least between Feedburner and txp regarding rss feeds that have been updated with postdated content: somehow, Feedburner isn’t registering the feed as having been updated with new content.

Or maybe it’s swamp gas. Or Mercury’s in retrograde. I don’t know yet; there’s more googling and troubleshooting to be done. But I thought I’d post something of what I know thus far here and see if anyone could say, you silly rabbit, the answer you seek is right over there.

Relevant links:

<a href=“http://thecityofroses.com/”>thecityofroses.com</a>
<a href=“http://thecityofroses.com/rss/”>RSS feed</a>
<a href=“http://thecityofroses.com/atom/”>atom feed</a>
<a href=“http://feeds.feedburner.com/CityOfRoses”>Feedburner feed</a>

kiplet · 2006-08-16 18:51:57

Brief update: there’s a “resynch” tool on Feedburner that apparently is more robust than just pinging them. The Feedburner feed is now up to date with atom and rss. The problem’s been passed on to Feedburner tech support; further bulletins etc. etc.

hcgtv · 2006-08-16 20:42:17

The RSS feed in 4.0.3 has it’s problems depending on what you use to read it.

Sometimes the feeds are read in reverse chronological order, etc. I am running a site using what’s in SVN, which will be 4.0.4, and the new RSS feed has none of these issues.

kiplet · 2006-08-16 20:59:20

The feeds themselves are fine and dandy, for me at least. It’s other things not recognizing the feeds as having been updated for some reason.

zem · 2006-08-18 00:04:39

There’s also a caching issue. The lastmod date is updated whenever content is added or modified. There’s nothing to trigger a new lastmod date when future articles become visible.

kiplet · 2006-08-18 00:14:52

I was worried about that.

Tomorrow I’ll have a little more info, as that’s when the next postdated post I’ve got in the queue is set to publish. Feedburner claims there was a hiccup on Wednesday which prevented them from properly synching a number of feeds, so there’s a chance the rss feed will still work properly, but if it’s a caching problem, then it won’t, and I’ll have to resynch again—and resynch every time I want the feed to reflect the appearance of a postdated post.

Is there a workaround or a fix for this, does anyone know? I’d find it hard to believe I’m the first person to run into this issue, with postdated content in textpattern. If there isn’t a workaround, is it too late to put this on the could-someone-fix-this list for 4.0.4?

kiplet · 2006-08-18 13:57:58

Yup, that’s the problem.

So: when a post-dated post hits its publish date, the front page, archive, and feeds all change, since new content is now available. But because that content was actually added to the site at an earlier date, no real change was made to the overall site itself, so the lastmod date doesn’t change, and so anything relying on that to get new info—a feed reader crawlby, say—doesn’t see anything new, and so doesn’t pick up the new content.

Despite the fact that the front page, archive, and feeds are all different than the last time it crawled through the site.

So I have to either manually add other content to the site or manually resynch Feedburner to the site’s feed after the postdated content appears, which utterly obviates any reason I’d have for postdating content. I can’t add something to automagically appear later, since people who read the site through a feed reader won’t see it until I go in manually and do something.

I see from comments re: 4.0.4 troubleshooting that lastmod preferences are being addressed in some fashion, but I can’t tell if it would affect this problem or not, as my technical know-how is rather rapidly depleted.

zem · 2006-08-18 23:37:41

Please test r1736.

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#1 2006-08-16 18:27:39

Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#2 2006-08-16 18:51:57

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#3 2006-08-16 20:42:17

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#4 2006-08-16 20:59:20

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#5 2006-08-18 00:04:39

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#6 2006-08-18 00:14:52

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#7 2006-08-18 13:57:58

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

#8 2006-08-18 23:37:41

Re: Postdated posts don't show up in RSS feed readers--?

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