I was facing the same problem as the thread opener. The hint using metadata plugboards was helpful, but it took me some time to sort things out. So if someone else looks for a solution, (s)he might not spend as much time as I did.
Basically in my Kindle 3 setup downloaded news are shown in my home with their title and their date, but in archived items with their title and the author (i.e. "Calibre" in the standard settings). Since my wife downloads only now and then some news from the archived items, it's impossible for her to figure out which is the most current item (unfortunately the sort order is not correlated to the date).
So instead of changing the title, I decided to change only the author field. Now the archived items show also the date. This was achieved by using metadata plugboards.
- In Preferences go to Metadata plugboards.
- In the line "Add new plugboard", choose "mobi" as format and "any device" as device.
- Copy and paste {title:'format_date(today(), "yy-MM-dd dddd")'} to the field "Source template".
- Choose "authors" as "Destination field".
- Click on "Save plugboard".
- Leave the dialog by clicking on "Apply".
It worked for me, but it has at least these two caveats:
- Instead of the publishing date, the current date is used. This is usually no problem, since at least for my downloads these are identical.
- If you use more than one Mobi-compliant Ereader than you should probably more specific about the device setting.
I hope this will be helpful to someone out there.
Take care,
Pessac