Changing (or Fixing) Publish Date of Blogger Posts to put posts in right order in both Blogger and Feedburner

Are your blog posts out of order because you edited an old post? If so, this article explains how to reset the publish time so that your posts will be displayed in the correct chronological order.

Background
I often edit previous Blogger posts in order to add more information or fix spelling and grammatical errors.  Usually, this is not a problem. I simply select the blog post that I wish to alter, make the changes and then press the orange "Update" button at the top of the page. The post is immediately updated in both Blogger and Feedburner.

However, when I edited a 4 day old post yesterday, it was published with the current time and became the first (most recent) entry in my blog. This was quite a surprise for me because the post title contained the date 11/03/12 and it appeared in the blog before 11/07/12. For me, having posts displayed in a chronological order is important.

Usually when a post is edited, the original post date is maintained but the edit date is updated. Since this information is contained in the Feedburner XML Source, I looked to see what dates were included. For the post in question, I noticed that the published, updated and edited times were all changed to yesterday's date, thus making it the most recently published.

I did not know if this was a Blogger or Feedburner bug because my action began in Blogger and was visible in Feedburner.

After doing a few Google searches, I found that others experienced this same problem as far back as 2009.  This surprised me because I had never experienced it.

Luckily, I discovered a thread in the Google Product Forums for Blogger which described how to fix this problem.

The Solution
The remedy for changing a post's publish date is relatively easy. Simply:

• edit the post which is out of order,
• click the "Published on" link in the Post settings toolbar on the right of the Blogger screen (#1)
• make sure the "Set date and time" toggle is checked
• click on the calendar day that you wish to be set
• enter the time that you want the post published
• press the "Done" button (#2)
• press the "Update" button next to the post's title. (#3)

Once this is completed, the post will be republished with the date you want and the post will be automatically positioned in the correct chronological order in both Blogger and Feedburner!