wp-plugins/recent-posts-with-excerpts — pull request #1 by johnReeve (2013-08-21 21:33:08+00:00)
Title: fix echo problem wt (get_)the_date

If you run just the_date, it places it outside of the H3 tag, I think... or at least this fixed it locally for me. get_ functions generally don't automatically echo, so you can concatenate them.