If you edit a small town's news page, you are probably no stranger to the issue of having to scour the web for news about your town. For smaller locations, there are not always a lot of sources covering your area, and finding current news can be a bit challenging.

The Topix wire is there to help, of course, but as smart as our systems are, they don't catch everything. There is a handy trick you can use when your wire just isn't cutting it. Below, is a snap of the wire for a tiny town called Willow Glen that was incorporated into San Jose, CA about a million years ago, give or take. At this moment, the wire for Willow Glen looks like this:

As you can see, there is some content in the wire, but not much. We're showing about 60 results in the Willow Glen wire. There MUST be more happening in this tiny burg, right? There is!

By doing a title search on any Topix page like this:

You get significantly more results, almost twice as many in this case.

This search will show you all of the content that has the phrase you searched for in the title of the article. Not all of these articles will end up in your wire, but many probably should. (Mental note: Humans ARE better than robots.) If you are having a tough time finding the content you need in the wire, try this search on Topix and see what else turns up. The results may surprise you.

There was a little treat for you editors in the site update that went out yesterday. Those of you who are active in the forums are probably already familiar with the reply tracker in the header of your Topix page. It looks a little something like this:

Starting now, that reply tracker will show you not only the new activity on threads where you have posted a comment, but also the comments on any news stories that you have posted to your news page. Let's say that again. You can now keep track of all the comments that your news stories generate. How cool is that?

And with that, a whole new level of competition unfolds and new questions arise. How can you choose stories that engage my audience? Keeping track of the activity on different types of articles you post will give you a pretty good idea of what your readers are interested in. How many comments do your stories generate?

One of the easiest and best ways to format your news stories to stun is to include photos. I know this can sometimes make editors nervous because they are worried about legal restrictions with regard to use of photos or to taking photos at public events. Someone on our team pointed me to this awesome guide to Photography and the Law at Photojojo.com. There is some GREAT information here. I know I learned a few things.

Let's see some photos!