I have a feed that appears with the wrong dates in the UI.
To debug, I fetched:
The feed using Newsblur
The feed using curl
An example article using my web browser
… and I observed the following inconsistency:
The example article was published February 7, 2025 according to the article’s webpage.
That date is confirmed by the RSS feed, which has an entry for the article with "date_modified": "2025-02-07T15:55:00.000Z".
But in the Newsblur web UI, the article is labeled as “Today, February 21st 14:22”. (Specifically, that’s in the .NB-feed-story-date element.)
And the Newsblur Android app shows the same problem.
I suppose the feed might have been fetched today at 14:22. But it’s a two-week-old article, and the feed correctly identifies its date_modified. So why does Newsblur think it was published today?
The dates on the posts line up with the times Newsblur has fetched the feed. The feed has a date_modifed value for each item but no date_published value.
Both date_published and date_modified are option per the json feed spec.
I’m guessing Newsblur is set up to use the feed fetch time as the item time if no date_published was provided. Probably easy to make it use date_modified if only it is present, but I can understand thinking if a feed doesn’t contain date_published it won’t have date_modified either seeing how they relate to each other.
In the meantime, you could switch over to their regular RSS feed, it properly specifies when posts were published: The Washington Stand
Had to guess my way to it from the json feed url since the site doesn’t link to either…
Can I propose that for all feeds with a date_modified but no date_published, Newsblur should interpret date_modified as date_published?
The .xml URL looks like a promising workaround. I updated the feed’s URL and Newsblur removed the feed from “All Site Stories.” But that might be a temporary condition, until new articles become listed in the feed.
In any case, a generalized fix for any feed having date_modified but no date_published seems appropriate.