I had thought I saw a time window of 10/16 - 10/30 to work on the games on the jam's page but now I see it is a week shorter. Did I miss something? :o

Nope, nothing's changed. The jam consists of two stages:
1. Submission period is 7 days.
2. Voting period is 7 days.
The date range that itch.io uses for link previews includes the voting period, but games must be made in the submission period.

Oh okay! I missed that then. Thank you for the clarification!