Publication dates

pubDate, updated, and lastBuildDate fields support ordering and freshness checks.

Checked by FeedInspector

Capability checks

Metrics

Definition

Date fields indicate when entries were published or updated. RSS commonly uses pubDate and lastBuildDate, while Atom uses updated and published.

Why it matters

Feeds without parseable dates are hard to sort and monitor. Freshness and cadence metrics become unreliable.

How FeedInspector checks it

FeedInspector evaluates item.date, feed.updated, and tech.dateFormats. It also computes avgItemIntervalHours and updateRegularityScore from parsed item dates.

Common problems and fixes

Problem: Non standard date strings like 20/02/2026 10:00.
Fix: Use RFC 822 for RSS or ISO 8601 for Atom consistently.
Problem: lastBuildDate stays stale while items keep changing.
Fix: Update feed level dates during each publish operation.

Minimal example

RFC 822 date

<item>
  <guid>post-2</guid>
  <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
</item>