Date problem in FeedCreator

My RSS Feed creator of choice is FeedCreator from bitfolge.de. It's easy to use and comes with RSS 0.91/1.0/2.0, OPML 1.0, Unix mbox, ATOM 0.3, and customizable HTML or Javascript formats. However, I was having a problem with getting the date to show up in the feed. I'm not really sure what was wrong, but I after I used: $item->date = strtotime($MySqlDate); instead of $item->date = $MySqlDate; everything worked just fine.