I’m often surprised to learn how little some members know about the programs and services that AAN offers. Perhaps it’s because we don’t toot our own horn often enough. So I’m starting a new blog feature today called “Didja Know?”, which will be completely devoted to horn tooting.

Today’s toot is to let you know about one of our AltWeeklies.com widgets — a website teaser featuring links and brief descriptions of interesting stories from AAN papers. (The links lead users directly to the originating papers’ websites, not to AltWeeklies.com.) Most of the stories are selected by our editor, Jon Whiten, who looks for compelling content with a national or international appeal.

The teasers are highly customizable. You can create different teasers featuring content relevant to specific sections of your site (e.g., music, news, etc.). You can vary the number of story links displayed within each teaser and sort them to your heart’s content. You can format teasers in a variety of different shapes and sizes. And you can exclude content from your own paper to avoid duplication. (By next week you also will be able to exclude stories from other AAN papers as well — your competitor, for instance.)

So if you’re looking for more dynamic alternative-newsweekly content to give readers another reason to visit your website more often, you can’t go wrong with an AltWeeklies.com teaser or two.

If you want to see what an AltWeeklies teaser looks like in action, take a look here or here. Or if you’re looking at this on the right page, there might even be an AltWeeklies widget about half-an-inch to the left of this sentence.