I have a few RSS Widgets in the sidebar of https://www.capecodbirdclub.org/. I have noticed that the links to the posts are not updated as frequently as the RSS feed I have in my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar. It's sometimes a few posts behind. Refreshing the browser doesn't help, closing Firefox and restarting doesn't help.

In searching for a reason/solution (since I know little about RSS feeds, and how they work), I did find one page (http://www.village-idiot.org/archive...ss-rss-widget/) that says to modify functions.php with:
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('$a', 'return 1800;') );
The page says "The above code will cause the feeds to be checked every 30 minutes."

Does this sound like a reasonable solution? If so, does it matter where in functions.php I put it?

If someone has a better solution, I'd love to hear it.

You could try using the Code Snippets plugin that lets you add code to functions.php without editing the file itself.

Thanks, I didn't know about that plugin. I've put the code in there, and will wait to see if the feeds seem to be more current.