Local News America Gets Faster Search and Smushed Bugs

Yesterday I finished the housework, got ResearchBuzz squared away, and sat down at the computer about 2pm with the intention of doing some troubleshooting of Local Search America‘s news aggregator, Local News America. SEVEN AND A HALF HOURS LATER I creakily unfolded myself and staggered to the kitchen in search of linner. What I thought was going to be a quick change ended up being a very long but ultimately fruitful bug hunt and upgrade. Local News America aggregates the RSS feeds of over 1000 local news sources and makes them searchable by keyword and/or browsable by state with links back to the original content. About a dozen topic feeds (including data centers, activism, and local / federal government) are also available. (The site doesn’t scrape the web for full article content. It aggregates public RSS feeds only.) The search is much faster now. There was a bug that was hiding sources from some states; that has been resolved. I admit that 90% of the reason I made Local News…