By Ryan G. Murphy, Digital Media Editor

Being a weekend web producer can be a lonely job. There’s typically not much news, your analytics are depressing to look at, and ordering takeout means finding someone else in the newsroom willing to order another Pad Thai to meet the $15 minimum. I’ve been there before, you’re not alone – and I promise you that there are ways to make your time in the chair more productive during off-peak hours.

Looking at your site metrics on the weekend can be depressing. Everything’s down. Page views. Uniques. Time on site. It’s awful. Since there’s often little going on during the weekends and you can’t create news, this is a great time to reach beyond Twitter and Facebook to the heavyweight aggregators like Drudge Report and Fark.com.

In most cases, these sites are looking for traffic on the weekends just like you. With Drudge, pitch original stories that you think could have national significance or something very odd that happened in your market. With Fark, it’s all about the headline. Some of the most successful submitters I know have about a 10 percent success rate on Fark. It pays to be persistent, particularly on the weekends when the competition for links is a little lighter.

Another suggestion is to find a fun project to work on in the newsroom. When I was at WBZ-TV in Boston, I was sitting talking baseball in the dead of winter with our sports reporter, Dan Roche, when I asked: “Hey, what do you think Sox lineup will look like on opening day?” He offered his guess and I turned it into a slideshow – one that ended up leading the site for the weekend and later on as well. It turns out that he was eerily close to predicting the lineup top to bottom, including several trades and free agent pick-ups.

I don’t have to tell anyone working in web news that slideshows are the big money maker. Jump on that and create them for everything you can manage on the weekends – fires, car accidents, entertainment stories. Whatever traffic you are getting will grow exponentially if you add 10 compelling pictures to the mix.

What preempts your Saturday and Sunday newscasts more than anything else? Sports. People love their sports, especially their local teams. If you work in Denver on a Sunday, you know you’re spending about half your day on Broncos coverage. Whatever market you’re in, embrace that. You’re likely never going to compete with ESPN.com on the big stories so take the uber-local angle. Get something up about the kicker from Framingham who walked on to the Boston College Eagles and kicked the game winner in overtime. People love that kind of coverage. If you deliver it, you’ll start to notice a difference in your metrics.

Above all else, make sure to stay on your toes on the weekends, because if you get a big breaker, there’s nothing better than seeing your email alert, Twitter update, Facebook update and text alert 10 minutes before the competition knows the tornado hit Main Street.