RSS comment feeds reporting wrong last modified headers

Hi –

I’m trying to isolate a problem with the comments feeds on my WordPress install. I’m on 2.0.2.

Here’s the issue: I’m using a service from FeedBurner (where I also work, btw) called FeedFlare, which does a head request on the post feed to see whether there’s new content. (Specifically, it’s checking to see how many comments are on the post, and then reporting that number in my feed as a dynamically updated image so feed readers can see whether there are any comments on the post). We first check the last-modified headers, and if the last-modified timestamp is older than our last retrieval of the feed, we won’t retrieve the full content of the feed.

Right now, the ‘‘feed for my latest post’‘ is reporting a last-modified date of Tue, 09 May 2006 18:46:13 GMT, even though a comment was added this morning. (You can see the headers by going ‘‘here’‘. So FeedBurner sees the last-modified date of yesterday and doesn’t update our cache, even though the feed itself contains further info.

How can I force WordPress to report the correct last-modified date/time so that down-stream services (whether our own, or aggregators who are using last-modified as a trigger to determine whether to download new content) function properly?

Hope I’ve provided enough detail, let me know if there are other pieces of info that’ll help figure this out.

Thanks,

Rick
VP, Business Development
FeedBurner