⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

After reading about Alex Hsu’s post “Your RSS posts might only live half as long as everyone else’s” today, I immediately checked the information in my RSS feed, and found out that the <pubDate> field inside the RSS feed takes the date field instead of the lastmod field, specified inside the post’s frontmatter. The publishing time I expect to be displayed in RSS feed should be the latter.

My current publishing process

This site is currently built using Hugo and GitHub Pages. When I write a new article, I will look at the current time just before saving the file, then manually fill in the time into the date field of the frontmatter, and then push it to GitHub as soon as possible. When I update old articles, I don’t edit the date field but lastmod instead. Little did I know, that such an update method would actually screw myself up.

Start working on it

To modify the publish date inside the RSS feed, we can start with the file layouts/rss.xml (at least this is the file for the theme I am using now). There is a line in this file that looks like this:

<pubDate>{{ .PublishDate.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</pubDate>

Where .PublishDate represents the date field of the frontmatter, and lastmod is .Lastmod. Just replace this value and it should be done.

I don’t know if it is possible to automatically fill in and change the publish date based on my current publishing process. If possible, I might try it when I have time in the future.

📌 Update on 2026/04/24

Found this Hugo option to fetch dates from Git. Not sure if it’s useful for me or not.