Robb. Knight.

Since I really got back into following RSS feeds in the past couple of years I've noticed a problem with Eleventy sites^[1] and post dates. This also caused me an issue while building EchoFeed but that's a story for another day. If I didn't know better I'd think everyone is scheduling their posts at midnight.

It's 3:15pm as I write this. Assume you create a post in Eleventy and set some frontmatter like so:

---
title: We Need to Talk About Your Eleventy Post Dates
date: 2024-03-14
---

So the date is today and the title is We Need to Talk About Your Eleventy Post Dates. You finish up the actual post, deploy your site, and you're done. Then it shows up in my RSS reader but it looks like this:

Notice it says midnight as the time. This is because we didn't include a time with the date. This isn't a problem in isolation unless you happen to be a multiple-posts-a-day kind of person but if this is posted at 15:15 and I check my RSS reader for posts made today right after it's posted for the first time that day, this post is actually at the bottom of all the posts.

I'm guilty of this too - any of my posts prior to 2021ish all have no time specified. New posts since then have the date set in the metadata in ISO format:

date: 2024-03-14T15:14:14.578Z

Maybe you don't care about this which I totally get but I also think there might be some people who didn't even realise this was happening with their posts.

![!NOTE] Update
this is also explained in more detail on the Eleventy docs.