Running Planet With RSS 0.9 Feeds

One of the little bits of trivia I learned while setting up PlanetGLLUG was how the planet software deals with RSS 0.9 feeds. The original “specification” for this version didn’t require each entry/post to have a date associated with it; although a lot of feeds work around this by either using the later revisions or including the Dublin Core name-space and dates.

This causes the planet software to add every item in the RSS feed to the planet with the same date, the one on which it first pulls in the entries. This came as a bit of a shock to me and I was worried that it’d do this every time the feed was updated. Fortunately as long as your planet “cache” directory is usable it’s smart enough to only add the new entries with the date set to when it encounters them.