# Atom feed bad dates in google reader?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/atom-feed-bad-dates-in-google-reader/147912>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 6, 2008, 11:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/atom-feed-bad-dates-in-google-reader/147912 "2008-09-06T23:15:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/aeb1de/32.png) [@andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andy)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2008, 11:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/atom-feed-bad-dates-in-google-reader/147912/1 "2008-09-06T23:15:38Z")

</div>

My atom feed validates [1] and shows in various browsers fine (the  
published date). I’m using the atom\_feed\_helper [2] very minimally  
modified and am on Rails 2.1. I am also using Feedbuner as the xml  
+rss alternate link in the meta section.

Whenever I subscribe to the feed in google reader, it also shows the  
posts as the date I uploaded my application to the production server.  
So in other words, if I uploaded today, google reader will show today  
for all the posts.

I examined the output XML to something Mephisto would put out, and it  
looks very similar. I tried tweaking the date format using strftime.  
I’ve thrown away the atom\_builder code and did some older RSS code  
from dzone snippets and elsewhere, also making sure they validate.  
Yet despite all that, I still can’t get the dates to show up in google  
reader correctly! Agghh. Any ideas?

- access feed directly: [HugeDomains.com](http://webandy.com/feed)

[1]  
[http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebandy.com%2Ffeed](http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebandy.com%2Ffeed)  
[2] [GitHub - rails/atom\_feed\_helper: NOTICE: official repository moved to https://github.com/TrevorBramble/atom\_feed\_helper](http://github.com/rails/atom_feed_helper/tree/master)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/aeb1de/32.png) [@andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andy)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2008, 11:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/atom-feed-bad-dates-in-google-reader/147912/2 "2008-09-06T23:22:39Z")

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Also I’m using page caching in a couple places, but the feed should be  
generated from the builder DSL code for each request. Has anyone had  
problems with feedburner messing up the feed? It appears to be a valid  
Atom feed as well.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/aeb1de/32.png) [@andy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andy)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2008, 7:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/atom-feed-bad-dates-in-google-reader/147912/3 "2008-09-17T07:12:42Z")

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Anyone? Have a totally separate app using rss.builder (not  
atom). feed is valid RSS 2.0. In Google reader, still see a  
different date than the published data for the article, see the date  
that appears to be when feedburner updated. Pretty annoying.