What is the correct format for RSS feed pubdate?

Question

I'm having trouble getting the date of my RSS Feed to run correctly. Do you know what the proper date to show it is?

I have it stored in a field called creation_date in this format: 2012-08-14 10:17:12

Then i grab it:

$pubDate = $article[creation_date];

Then I convert it:

$pubDate= date("Y-m-d", strtotime($pubDate));

Then within my item tag I place it:

<pubdate>'.date("l, F d, Y", strtotime($pubDate)).'</pubdate>

Is there something that I'm not seeing?

Answer 1

The PHP date function has already a way to format pubDate (RFC 2822) compliant dates:

date('r', $timestamp);