Can you please add an item's publish date (<pubDate>) to the RSS feed? It's seriously low-hanging fruit. Just whatever the date in the DB says is fine - there must be a 'created' timestamp in there somewhere. Format it as RFC822 timestamp:

def _format_date(dt): """convert a datetime into an RFC 822 formatted date Input date must be in GMT. """

    #   Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:00:01 GMT

    return "%s, %02d %s %04d %02d:%02d:%02d GMT" % (
            ["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"][dt.weekday()],
            dt.day,
            ["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
             "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"][dt.month-1],
            dt.year, dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second)

-Russ