I have an RSS feed being generated out of Yahoo pipes. The URL for the feed is:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=c4ec2ca51d74d8830a1b699d9f575daf&_render=rss

When I run it through the W3C RSS Validator, the pubDate for an example item is listed as:

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:32:52 -0800

If I run it through the Validome RSS validator (RSS 2.0, View Sourcecode checkbox marked), that same date is listed as:

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:32:52 +0000

However, when I consume the feed in Feed Manager, the date being shown is:

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 11:32:52 AM

So it looks like mojoPortal is "double correcting" the date to try and convert it to our local time zone. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Jamie

Update: If I use a custom date string of "MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt z", I get the following date shown:

03/10/2010 11:32 AM -8

Hey thanks, Joe. I know that RSS feeds are supposed to be using GMT, and mine is definitely doing that. On a hunch, I took a look at the mojoPortal.com RSS feedburner feed. The date from your most recent blog post appears in the feed as:

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:23:26 GMT

Whereas Yahoo! pipes is outputting in a time format like this:

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:23:26 +0000

The top version is shown properly in my Feed Manager as 10:23 AM. So perhaps mojoPortal is not properly handling a pubDate that uses +0000/-0800 time zone specifiers?

Hey Joe, thanks for that update. I did a bit of research on the RSS side, and according to the RSS Specification,  RFC 822 Section 5 is to be used for the date format. Hard to believe that the RSS date format specification is almost 30 years old!

Anyway, RFC 822 lists "Local differential" hours as a valid method of specifying the time zone.

I did some further research on the Argotic forum, and this bug was originally reported in August 2008 (!) and has apparently not been addressed yet. Check this link:

http://argotic.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=32981

Unfortunately, from all appearances, Argotic seems to be abandoned by the primary developer "Oppositional," and he posted a message asking for volunteers to pick up the slack last year. The hazards of open source!

So I guess that kind of leaves mojoPortal's Feed Manager in limbo for now. I'll explore Argotic's source and see if I can identify a method to fix this problem. I've narrowed it down to SyndicationDateTimeUtility.cs.

If I can give you the source code updates to fix this, would you be able to update the Argotic source and distribute new DLLs for mojoPortal? I'm not well versed on the terms of everyone's license.

Thanks again, Joe

Jamie

That's awesome Joe. Thanks a million!

Jamie

Hey Joe, I took a quick glance at the RSS.NET source from http://www.rssdotnet.com/, but it actually look like the date parsing is even more crude than Argotic (they just assume GMT and strip off the end of the string).

To give you a head start, I took a look at Argotic's SyndicationDateTimeUtility.cs

I think the change may be as simple as adding this to the if-else blocks in ReplaceRfc822TimeZoneWithOffset:

else if (Match(value.Substring(value.Length-4,4),"\d{4}",RegexOptions.None))

{
     return String.Format(null, "{0}+{1}:{2}", value.Substring(0,value.Length-4),value.Substring(value.Length-4,2),value.Substring(value.Length-2,2));

}
 

I haven't had a chance to test this code, but you can try it either with my pipe output, or any of the Yahoo Hot Jobs RSS feeds.

Jamie

Wow, Joe, you work fast! Thanks again!

Jamie