Serendipity Forums

I looked into the problem a little further, and think I know what the problem is -- but have no clue how to fix it. In case it sparks any thoughts in you, here's what I just posted to the Google Forums, which explains what I think is going on.

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The problem cropped up again today, so I've created an image that illustrates the issue as best as I understand it. To me, it looks like Google Reader is replacing the 'published' date with the date that the feed was last modified for posts roughly one year old. As you can see in this image, opening the RSS feed in Firefox shows the correct date on the item in question (April 09, last year) and the actual XML for the item lists the PubDate as April 09, last year. Only in Google Reader, the PubDate has been changed to the date and time that the feed was last modified (yesterday, April 22 at 11am).

http://www.evilontwolegs.com/videos/google01.jpg

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi!

This is definitely a good explanation! However, as I see it, it is okay for serendipity to update the lastModified time of the general feed, as long as the publishdate remains intact. So I tend to agree that it's a bug on google's end. They surely have a reason for doing so, maybe for compatibility with other feed providers. It would be great to get feedback, why they do not interpret the item's date in higher significance than the feed date.

Regards,
Garvin

I'm still testing it and will need to keep an eye on it for a while, but I think I found a fix. I'm running the feed through feedburner, I set it to 'force' feedburner in the options and I edited the page.tpl to reference the feedburner url instead of the normal file. As far as I can tell, feedburner somehow fixes the problem... not sure how or why, but it does.

Unfortunately, the feed still shows some of my posts out of order because of the way google's cache works (at least this is my understanding). Old posts that were inaccurately dated are stuck in their cache, so new subscribers will see my older posts out of order. Google caches your old posts even after they no longer appear in your feed, which I really wish they wouldn't. There doesn't seem to be any way to fix things since google will never reindex those old posts. I wish they had some way of telling reader you, as the rss owner, want to clear their cache completely and start fresh -- but the only responses I've been able to find on the subject are "we're sorry, once a post is cached its there for good, unless you make changes to the post and modify its date so it once again appears in your feed."