Basically I need to pull out two things, a direct link to image/thumbnail, and date.
in the ideal world, the filenames would be in unix-epoch so I could only look for a single line per post. But I know this isn't ideal - I don't like it either, some people use semantic file names, or tags, which makes more sense for accessibility.
But! As long as the feed has <link>direct://url.to.image
and
<pubDate>(that's rss valid)
That's fine.
Also if pubDate was in UTC-0, I wouldn't have to do magemathical formulas :')