Stupid in this case meaning my code :) I was looking at the bug list for BottomFeeder on SourceForge yesterday, and found a bug I should have dealt with a long while back:

(url here) is an example of a feed that doesn't have dates attatched to items.

I cannot sort items within a sub-folder by date if the folder includes such a feed.

Well, that seemed like something that shouldn't happen. I thought I was assigning default timestamps to items without them, but it turns out I wasn't. Why, I'm not sure; I guess it hadn't come up before. In any case, it was a simple fix. After getting an Item object from a feed, I have post processing code to clean up problems. That code does things like:

• Insert default titles
• Add the current time as the point of last update
• If there's no link, and the GUID looks like an URL, consider it the link as well

And now, it goes ahead and slaps a timestamp on items that are missing them. Most of this only applies to RSS; the Atom spec mandates behavior in these areas, so it's less of a problem.