The Wrong Advices

I’ve been doing some work on a site that utilises a significant number of RSS feeds for content, and I’ve come across an annoying thing that two sites are doing.

I had noticed that certain headlines were staying at the top of the feed list for days after they were added. I had a look at the rss xml files and saw what was happening. The dates on these stories had been marked as being posted a few weeks into the future, so the stories would stay at the top of the list till it hit that date and then would start dropping. I can’t imagine this not being intentional.

The surprising thing was the two sites doing it are professional media organisations. I would have thought they’d know better.

The workaround is simple enough, just ignore the date in the feed and set it as the current date regardless. Drupal should have an option to do this automatically.