Imported posts show up dated 1969? Why? How to fix?

I’m surprised there aren’t any responses. Maybe it’s just because I posted in the middle of the night.

I can’t be the first person to have this problem, but when I did a search for 1969 all I could find was posts about people wanting to set their posts to years earlier than that. Am I really having that unique a problem?

Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you very much for reading.

I may just have to import all of the entries and manually correct them afterward, but I’d hate to do that. Doesn’t anyone have a solution?

I figured it out. I’m posting this just to help anyone else who may search on these terms in the future.

The import problem has been solved! Here’s what was happening:

Check out the code on the post that was showing up as 1969.

AUTHOR: Alan Kistler
TITLE: Sci-Fi Writers Ready To Fight Terror!
BASENAME: scifi_writers_ready_to_fight_t
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 05/31/2007 14:01:58 PM
CONVERT BREAKS: 1
PRIMARY CATEGORY: Off-topic

Look at that date again: 05/31/2007 14:01:58 PM

PM? If you’re using military time, you don’t need a PM. The odd thing is that the morning posts with AM after it import just fine, but posts with PM would cause it to be import as 1969.

A simple find-and-replace of my exported text files cleaned up the posts and now they’re importing without a fuss. As soon as I’ve finished my test of a few more imports, we should be good to go.

In the meantime, enjoy reading more and more of the archived posts.

Thanks for documenting your fix, even though you figured it out yourself. It helped me in a slightly related issue.

I’m seeing this problem with a new installation of WordPress.

The interesting thing is that the “Published on” date in the admin account is correct but if you “Edit” the entry it shows the “December 31st, 1969” date.

The date as displayed in in the postings is also incorrect.

I’m seeing this problem with a new installation of WordPress.

The interesting thing is that the “Published on” date in the admin account is correct but if you “Edit” the entry it shows the “December 31st, 1969” date.

The date as displayed in in the postings is also incorrect.

BTY, doing a Google search returned, literally, 100s of entries showing this incorrect date in people’s blogs but it was like noone seemed to care. Is this such a pervasive problem in WordPress that people have stopped complaining about it and just accepted it as the way it is?

I found a solution:

In another post there was a recommendation to add the line:

date_default_timezone_set(‘America/New_York’);

To the start of wp-config.php

This seems to have fixed the problem.

I’m still curious why all those people out there don’t seem to care that the date stamp on all their blog entries is wrong. But that’s a mystery to be solved another day :^)