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1. rutherford
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   I have a blog posting that I published a few days ago. The situation has now changed meaning I want to post an update to it. I was wondering is there a feature in RSS/Atom that deals with updated posts - ie will republish them automatically when they are changed so that rss readers will update the story with the latest version?

2. Shane G.
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Hi,

   Check with these steps:

   -> Login into wordpress admin area
   -> Click on edit under posts section
   -> Hover on your post and you will see the edit link, click on that.
   -> Edit the post as required and click on update post

   Thanks,

   Shane G.

3. esmi
   Theme Diva & Mod
   Posted 2 years ago #

   @Shane: And how does that refresh the post date in the RSS feed?

   @rutherford: The publication date (<pubDate>) is unchanged in the RSS 2 feed when you edit a post. The Atom feed, however, does incorporate a timestamp (<updated>) that reflects when the post was edited. So the answer is "Yes & No - the RSS feed does not have an inbuilt mechanism for dealing with updated posts but the Atom feed does".

4. rutherford
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   thankyou esmi. I had an inkling Atom might do this. In your opinion what is defaut/common behaviour among feed readers when they encounter an atom (<updated>) timestamp?

   Do they bring the post back to the 'top' so to speak
   or do they create two copies of the item, one old one new
   or do they just ignore?

5. esmi
   Theme Diva & Mod
   Posted 2 years ago #

   To be honest, I have no idea as I rarely, if ever, use an Atom feed. In practice it's going to be entirely dependant on the individual feed parsers. The relevant RFC states:

   If multiple atom:entry elements with the same atom:id value appear in an Atom Feed Document, they represent the same entry. Their
   atom:updated timestamps SHOULD be different. If an Atom Feed
   Document contains multiple entries with the same atom:id, Atom
   Processors MAY choose to display all of them or some subset of them.
   One typical behavior would be to display only the entry with the
   latest atom:updated timestamp.

   Which suggests that the parsers may choose to display only the most recently updated copy of a post or both versions.

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