Distill blog posts display different/wrong dates compared to listing page

juliesquid · February 10, 2021, 5:39am

Hi All! I'm getting to know Distill, and it's great! Having created (simple) RMarkdown and blogdown websites in the past, I'm very excited for the possibilities here. But –

I'm having an issue with Distill blogs, and not sure if it's a bug or my misunderstanding of a feature. The behavior I'll describe I also see on many other distill blogs, including those linked from https://pkgs.rstudio.com/distill/articles/examples.html.

When I create a new blog post Rmd, knit, and rebuild the site, the date written in the Rmd's YAML is correctly displayed on the listing page. But, the date is incorrectly displayed on the actual blog post: it is dated as the day before the date in the YAML and on the listing page. So on the listing page, when you click on a post, the date displayed will be the wrong date: the (correct) date in the URL does not match the (incorrect) date displayed on that post.

Here is my simple blog here: https://github.com/openscapes/events.

Thanks for any help/understanding!

cderv · February 11, 2021, 1:57pm

I can't see that on your blog. Can you link to a post that has the incorrect date ?

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 3:17pm

Hi Christophe, yes: of course:

It shows up when the site is built:

On the listing page the date is March 8: https://openscapes.github.io/events/

And on that post's page the date is (incorrectly) March 7: https://openscapes.github.io/events/posts/2021-03-08-dr-dawn-wright-interview/. Note that this post's url slug is March 8, which is the correct date, displayed on the listing page.

There are more examples of this on the blogs linked from the distill packagedown page, one is themockup.blog.

Thanks for your help!

cderv · February 11, 2021, 3:46pm

I see the same date:

What am I missing something ?
Thanks for your patience explaining me !

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 5:10pm

Hi Christophe,

That is so fascinating! I've tried Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and all show the following:

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 5:11pm

Another example:

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 5:11pm

and (I can only do one image per post):

Thanks for your patience, I didn't know we weren't seeing the same thing!

cderv · February 11, 2021, 5:23pm

This is indeed fascinating !

I see the correct date for https://blogs.rstudio.com/ai/posts/2021-02-11-tabnet/ and https://themockup.blog/posts/2021-01-28-removing-image-backgrounds-with-magick/

@tom_rstudio an idea on this one ?

tom_rstudio · February 11, 2021, 5:25pm

I have an additional reprex of this, when changing the date of a post it will correctly adjust the "slug" but will do the date - 1 for the actual displayed date for the article.

cderv · February 11, 2021, 5:25pm

@juliesquid lets rule out a browser cache issue. Can you try a hard refresh on these website ?

cderv · February 11, 2021, 5:26pm

But why can't I see the same as you on those published blog posts ?
The capture we shared shows clearly a difference. I am bit puzzled here.

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 5:28pm

Thanks Christophe – I've done the hard refresh on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and the dates still mis-match

tom_rstudio · February 11, 2021, 5:41pm

I definitely see the March 7 vs March 8 on the blog live right now.

cderv · February 11, 2021, 5:44pm

So could it be an issue with timezone ? because I am in France and so I see the date not the same as you ?

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 6:03pm

Interesting Tom and Christophe.

Tom's gif shows this happening locally when he modifies the date after the slug is created, but that wouldn't be a timezone issue. Since that gif isn't displaying here and something is going on, shall I post an issue on https://github.com/rstudio/distill?

cderv · February 11, 2021, 6:09pm

yes you can open an issue. I'll try to reproduce locally. But I can't explain why I don't see the same date for an online website while we look at the same page just from different place in the world

cderv · February 11, 2021, 6:40pm

I really think this is a timezone issue. The code source of your page contains :

<script id="distill-front-matter" type="text/json">
{"title":"Interview with Dr. Dawn Wright","description":"Interview with Dr. Dawn Wright at MozFest","authors":[{"author":"Julie Lowndes & Erin Robinson","authorURL":"#","affiliation":"&nbsp;","affiliationURL":"#","orcidID":""}],"publishedDate":"2021-03-08T00:00:00.000+00:00","citationText":"Robinson, 2021"}
</script>

Which is the data process by the JS from distill library. As you see the date contains the timezone part.

So for me translated in CET it not the same day as for you I think. I'll look more closely into that tomorrow. Please open the issue in distill repo so we fix this.

juliesquid · February 11, 2021, 7:05pm

Ah, very interesting. I'll include this in the github issue.

I appreciate your time on this, thanks!

cderv · February 12, 2021, 3:00pm

For reference, the issue to continue this : https://github.com/rstudio/distill/issues/315

lisalendway · February 12, 2021, 3:25pm

I also see this on my blog and was wondering if it was a time zone issue because it seems not to happen for every post.