ERR_INVALID_PUBLICATION_DATE


Symptom

 

You notice that some items in your feed are not published on Facebook. In the log messages of the feed you see the following error message:

 

          "Invalid publication date in {number} items in your feed."

 

 

Cause

 

The feed item does not indicate the date it was published in a valid machine readable format.

 

In RSS for example, there is an element called pubDate which indicates the date when the item was published (created). The value specified must meet the Date and Time specifications as defined by RFC822, with the exception that the year should be expressed as four digits.

 

Every time an item is posted on your wall, RSS Graffiti writes down the date it was published (as indicated by the pubdate field in your feed) and from then on, it looks only for items newer than that, to further publish on your wall. If the publication date is invalid (thus not usable), RSS Graffiti has no other way of knowing if the item is new or not and whether it has already been published on your wall or not. As a result items without a valid publication date are not posted on your wall at all.

 

 

Resolution

 

If you have control over your feed, then you are probably able to fix this issue by following the rules bellow: 

 

Change the date-time format to comply with RFC822. Here are examples of valid RFC822 date-times:

     <pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 08:00:00 EST</pubDate>

     <pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 13:00:00 GMT</pubDate>

     <pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>

Common errors include localizing the month name or the days of the week, not using the exact abbreviation provided by the specification, or attempting to use a time zone name that is not listed. See here for the list of allowable values for these portions of the date.

 

Here is an example of an invalid RFC822 date-time. This is commonly seen in RSS 1.0 feeds generated by older versions of Movable Type:

     <pubDate>2002-10-02T08:00:00-05:00</pubDate>

If you are not in control of your feed, then you need to ask the system administrator or developer that controls your feed to update the publication date to adhere to the aforementioned rules.

If you can't do either of the above then unfortunately your feed cannot be used with RSS Graffiti.


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