Ben Murrell

I ran into a problem with Google Reader. I was working on another WordPress installation for my ACM chapter (http://acm.mst.edu/) – I wanted to have a calendar with our upcoming meetings on it. The plugin that did the closest thing to what I wanted was Event Calendar 3, but it doesn’t do it quite how I wanted the ACM site’s calendar to behave. It has the ability to put future events on the calendar. But all calendar events are tied to posts on the site. I don’t really want to make a post for every meeting / activity we will be having and have those posts show up on the main page all at the same time. Fine – there is an option in the plugin to hide posts that are in the “Event” category. The problem with that is that I’d have to have two posts for every meeting – one that contains the calendar event, and another that is published later that is our advertisement for the meeting. Having two posts would mean a lot of duplication of content and effort (calendar event posts still need information about the event, but the real meat of the information ends up being on the announcement/advertisement pages). I tried adding posts that would be published in the future so that the events would show on the calendar, but the posts wouldn’t show on the site until the publish date – no go.

What I eventually ended up doing was adding the “The Future is Now” plugin so that all posts are published regardless of their publish date. Then I modified my theme to not show posts on the main page that have publish dates in the future. Ok, great. I added all of the future dated posts for the upcoming ACM meetings, and it was working like a charm. Then I clicked my live bookmark in Firefox – all of the future dated posts were in the feed! I quickly realized my error and went in and edited WordPress’ feed functions to not show items that are in the future. My live bookmark reflected this change.

The next morning, I got an email from another officer explaining that all of the future posts were on the feed. I checked my live bookmark again, and it had the correct entries. I eventually figured out he was using Google Reader. Welp. Google Reader cached all of the feed entries as soon as they went up. Apparently Google Reader caches feeds then never uncaches them (this is due to a shortcoming in the Atom/RSS specifications apparently – if a post disappears, Google has no way of knowing if it just fell out of range, or if the post was deleted). So now anyone that uses Google Reader gets an RSS feed full of future events – the info isn’t private (all of the pages are accessible through the calendar anyways) – it kind of defeats the purpose of a feed though. Now when new posts are added to the feed, they’ll be added below the future dated items – essentially hiding them from the user that checks the top of the list for new entries.

I put in a request to Google to purge the cache – we’ll see if that gets anywhere.