Vox Annoyances - Drafts, Atom and Dates

Getting the previous post out was more of a nightmare than I'd have thought.

I've started aggregating my Vox posts, delicious links and Flickr photos with my old MT install over at husk.org. Generally this has gone pretty well, but I hit a nasty edge case when I came to drag my post advocating not-SLRs out of draft hell. Originally I sketched the article's outline in November of last year, but I was able to use the Edit Date widget to pull it to the present, and once I'd finished it, it appeared in the right place on the Vox page.

(Actually, this was also an annoyance. To do so, I had to manually click through five months and find today's date. It'd be nice if there was a "today" link somewhere to make this process easier. If it could use the current time, too, that'd be even better.)

Unfortunately, when the time came to regenerate husk.org's front page from the Atom feed, it was nowhere to be seen. A bit of digging in XML and code later, and I realised that the issued property for the XML::Atom::Entry object was still set to November; the modified date was what had changed to today. A swift edit later and I was sorting on modified instead, but then any entry that had even a minor edit to i would move forward in time. Scratch that idea, then.

In the end the fix I decided on was to delete the original entry, and recreate it afresh, so that the issued date was today. However, it seems that this is what Vox should be doing: editing the date on the compose screen should modify the Atom issued property, not the modified one. It would certainly have saved me a bit of work.