Some aggregators, like Planet, sort by mtime rather than ctime. This means that posts with modified content come to the top (which seems odd to me, but is presumably what the aggregator's author or operator wants),

Hah! That's so charitable I hope you can deduct it from your taxes. --Joey

but it also means that posts with insignificant edits (like adding tags) come to the top too. Atom defines <updated> to be the date of the last significant change, so it's fine that ikiwiki defaults to using the mtime, but it would be good to have a way for the author to say "that edit was insignificant, don't use that mtime".

Yes, this is a real limitiation of ikiwiki's atom support. --Joey

See smcv's 'updated' branch for a basic implementation, which only affects the Atom <updated> field or the RSS equivalent.

Other places the updated metadata item could be used (opinions on whether each should use it or not, please):

• sorting by mtime in the inline directive
• displaying "last edited" on ordinary pages

Tending toward no for both, but willing to be convinced otherwise.. merged --Joey