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Dear Kern County Parents,

Santa knows there are many boys and girls who haven’t written him yet this year. Please send your letters before it’s too late! He must receive your letter by 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 14th. With these time constraints, Santa can only receive your letters online, through our Letters to Santa site.

For every letter you submit, we're asking for a donation fee of $5, which will go to The Bakersfield Homeless Center. All letters will be posted on the Letters to Santa website, and a few compelling and heartwarming letters will also be selected to run in The Bakersfield Californian.

And, for each letter received, Santa will send you a special message.

Submit your letter today.

Thanks and Happy Holidays,
Santa’s Elves

We have launched some changes to our Privacy Policy on bakersfield.com and our family of local websites. These changes -- our first in several years – include several additions and slight tweaks to the existing policy.

Protecting your privacy has always been a priority for us at bakersfield.com and The Bakersfield Californian, and we’re committed to ensuring your experience with us is safe and enjoyable.

We encourage you to read the entire policy again, but here is a summary of the main changes:

• We’re now a part of the Yahoo ad network. We’re using Yahoo technology to serve banner advertising throughout our local network of sites, and are using a feature called behavioral targeting. In short, behavioral targeting tracks your interests based on the pages you visit, and delivers ads based on those interests. The idea is to target ads you’re likely to be interested in, which offer a better experience for you and the advertiser. For example, if you’re shopping for a car, you may see more ads from auto dealers or lenders. At no time do we share any of your personally identifiable information with third parties such as advertisers or marketers. Even though behavioral targeting is widespread on the most-popular sites on the web,  we have nothing to hide and understand some of you might have concerns. Here's the section that explains how our advertising works and links to Yahoo's opt-out policy governing ad targeting on its sites and those of its partners.
• We added language that allows us to email our registered users about site changes. The previous policy was so tightly written that we were prevented from emailing registered users about important things like these new changes in our privacy policy. I don’t anticipate changing the policy as much as Apple does with its iTunes policy, but I like being able to contact every customer directly to inform them of any changes, big or small.
• Along those same lines, we’ve added language that allows us to contact people who encounter problems ordering products from us.
• Emphasized the importance of taking simple steps to protect your own privacy when you create profiles, post comments and otherwise engage with our websites.

We’d love to hear any constructive thoughts, questions and concerns. 

Thanks.

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Is your kid the cutest? Yep, we thought so. That'sw why you need to enter Kern's Cutest Kid contest.

Submit a photo and tell us in 200 words or less whyyour kid is the cutest and we'll put your entry up for a public vote from Oct. 12-18. The winner will appear on the cover of the Californian's Applause section and on a quarter-page ad inside Applause. Second place will win a quarter-page ad in Applause.

We have more than 80 great entries already (check out the adorable slideshow). You have until Sunday to add your own, then get ready to vote!

We don’t have to tell you that football season has arrived. We’re less than a week away from the start of the NFL regular season, so it’s prime time to launch our new Pigskin Pick’em contest.

This year, our contest will focus on NFL games. The game is simple: Register, submit your weekly picks, and be eligible for weekly or season-ending prizes. You can place your picks here at bakersfield.com (also, coming soon, to your phone via our mobile site,  661411.com). You can also sign up to receive weekly reminders to make your picks.

In addition to picking the weekly winners for each game, there’s a separate contest called the “Survivor Game.” Each week, you pick a team you think will win, players are eliminated if their choice loses. You can only pick a team once, so it’s a contest that will require a bit of planning.

Pigskin Pick’em is free to play, although if you consistently pick losers, your friends may make you pay with all kinds of grief. But we know YOU know what you’re doing. Jump in and give the game a try.

P.S. Here’s an Insider tip from your friends at BdotCOM: Green Bay is flying under the radar amid all the hullabaloo over Favre and Cutler in the NFC North.
 

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(NOTE from BdotCOM: I screwed up the dates in the original post, so have updated to fix. Sorry for any confusion).

Sept. 7 is the deadline to submit your pets for Tails of Bakersfield and our Pet Idol competition, for which voting begins Sept. 8.

Tails of Bakersfield, which is in its second year, benefits local animal-welfare organizations. For $10, you can submit your pet photos. They’ll appear on bakersfield.com (here are the 292 submitted so far) and we’re printing as many as possible in The Bakersfield Californian. So far this year, those submissions have raised nearly $3,500 for local animal organizations.

For an extra $5, you can enter your pet in the “Pet Idol” contest. The 12 highest vote-getters will quality for a 2010 calendar, sales of which will also benefit local animal organizations.

So, you have through Sunday to get your photos posted, and rally support for your favorite Pet Idol nominee. It’s not too early to check out the submissions so far, and start to finalize your choices.

On behalf of local animal-welfare organizations, thanks for your support.

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We know the housing market is on fire, but so is the farm and ranchland business, where great deals abound in Kern County.

That’s why we’ve launched a new section on bakersfield.com that focuses on just that sector of the real estate market.

Features include:

• Search by price, acreage, property type and location.
• Mapped search, both local and nationally
• Listing of properties up for auction
• Self-serve advertising tools if you’re interested in selling your own farm or ranch property.

Happy hunting.

We had a technical failure at The Californian overnight that has affected our email system. As a result, we're not currently able to send or receive email. We're working to restore things but it may take all morning. We'll keep you updated.

If you need immediate assistance, try these phone numbers:

• Circulation issues: 392-5777
• Newsroom: 395-7384
• Bakersfield.com: 395-7565
• Advertising and general issues: 395-7500

Thanks for your patience.

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Knowing that people in Bakersfield love to shop and can't pass up a great bargain, we've launched a new staff blog called Bargain Betty.

"Betty" lives to bring you the best deals in Bakersfield. As Betty's profile reads:

"Even though the name is "Bargain Betty," we're a team of savvy shoppers and employees at The Bakersfield Californian offering you tips on how to shop smart and save locally.

"We'll be highlighting unique products and good buys in our Classifieds as well as sales, deals and discounts we hear about around town.

"Please send us your tips!"

Blog posts so far have been varied, ranging from yard sales and muscle cars to purses and Bengal kittens.

The Bargain Betty blog will augment our other great consumer and shopping features, including the Cheapskate blog on bakersfield.com, and the BakoDeals and BakoBiz feeds on Twitter.

Please share your ideas, tips and great deals with us. The wider the conversation, the better the deals and shopping experiences.

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If you're an Amazon Kindle user, you might be interested in subscribing to our popular Breaking News feed, now available in the Kindle Store. It's only $1.99 per month, or little more than 1 cent per post.

Yeah, it's the same Breaking News blog feed that's available on bakersfield.com, but if you're a Kindle user, you know how easy and convenient it is to have every post automatically downloaded onto your device. Check out what satisfied customer Moreno Perez had to say in sharing his 4-star rating.

Think about it: The best local breaking news for about 1 penny per post, automatically downloaded to your device.

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Our partners at Yahoo! HotJobs have created a new feature that sends you alerts when jobs of interest are posted online. What's cool is is that you can narrow the parameters so you're getting alerts only for the jobs or locations you're interested in, not spam for all jobs, like many other online services. 

Here's how it works: 

1) Got to our HotJobs section and search for a job you're interested in. 

2) When the results for your search come up (for example, here's a search showing all 564 Bakersfield job ads we currently have), simply click on the "Twitter Alert" link and sign in with your Twitter user name.

That's it.

When jobs that fit your needs are posted, you'll get a "direct message" into your Twitter account with a link to that specific job listing. And because the message is sent to you directly, it's your secret -- you don't have to worry about your boss finding out that you're looking for jobs elsewhere. 

You can also have the job alerts sent to you via email. Either way, if you're looking for work, you know how important it can be to jump on the opportunity. Why not use the tools that can give you that advantage? 

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You may have noticed that we've just launched some changes to our search on bakersfield.com.

First, we're adding Yahoo! Web search to our search box for those folks who want to search the web from bakersfield.com. This feature is just one facet of a local sales/content/technology partnership we have with Yahoo.

We've added tabs to key sections like News, Jobs and Homes so you can narrow your searches to those categories directly from the search box. 

We've also made some dramatic improvements to our local search results and presentation, and allow you get get much more granular in searching the many areas of bakersfield.com.

These improvements are the first in a series of changes we'll be making to our local search. We know there's much yet to be improved, but we did want to roll out these changes asap. 

You may experiencing some caching issues as we roll the new search box across templates but a page refresh should solve most rendering issues. 

As always, we'd love to get constructive feedback so we can continue to improve the search experience. 

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The Bakersfield Californian recently asked Cal State Bakersfield art students to paint a newspaper racks. 

And now we're asking you to vote for your favorite. If you vote, your name will be submitted into a drawing for 2 tickets to the Brad Paisley concert at Rabobank Arena on Sept. 24. We'll also give the winning artist a separate prize. 

You can view a gallery or slideshow of the artistic racks or check out a map locating these special racks  if you want to actually stop by and check them out in person.

Voting runs through Friday, July 31st at 5 pm. The winner will be contacted via email prior to Friday, Aug. 7th.

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Today is the last day to enter our Top Dads contest. We'll stop accepting submissions at 5 p.m.

The concept is simple: Tell us in 100 words or less why your dad is the best and we'll put your entry up for a public vote from June 9-17. The winner will receive a signed Kevin Harvick NASCAR pit jersey, and be annouced in the Sunday, June 21, edition of The Californian.

As of this morning, we have 45 submissions and some touching stories. We encourage you to check them out in our slideshow -- and add your own.

It’s graduation season, and bakersfield.com would like to help celebrate the hard work all the graduates have put in to get to this point in their lives.

Send us your videos capturing these momentous occasions, and we’ll post them on bakersfield.com.

There’s no charge – all we ask is that you do some editing before sending it to us. Everyone knows your kids, grandkids or homies are the best ever BUT we don’t need a long video to prove it. Keep them short (3 minutes is pushing it), sweet and maybe with a little humor or quirkiness, and you’re good to go.

Oh, and they need to be G-rated to get posted. No funny business, please.

Details and guidelines are at bakersfield.com. The upload process is simple, and takes only a few minutes.

Post away!

 

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We’re excited to announce the beta launch of a new site called Bakersfield Tween Tribune that, while designed to reach younger students, is appealing to older readers as well.

Bakersfield Tween Tribune has a dual mission:

1. to deliver news that’s of interest to younger readers
2. to give teachers FREE easy-to-use tools that allow students to participate in discussions around local and national news, and thereby learn important reading, writing and analytical skills.

Those discussions can be “walled off” so that students within single classes at individual schools can interact around news stories among themselves. For example, a seventh-grade English class at Fruitvale Junior High School can have their own version of the site, with story comments posted by that class's students visible only to that class, not even others at the same school. (The national version of the site contains comments submitted from readers not affiliated with particular classes).

Tween Tribune is a great tool to improve reading, writing and analysis skills in a controlled environment. Teachers have complete control via full moderation tools (all comments are moderated before appearing online), as well as the ability to design and share lesson plans with others at their school or district.  And as you can see by perusing the site, all stories are “safe” and suitable for younger readers. But as one adult told us, “I found myself wanting to read a lot of the stories I saw. There’s a lot of interesting stories for anyone.”

Tween Tribune was created by a father of two "tweens", and is being tested in other cities. Teachers in other areas have been impressed with the site’s ease of use, the administration tools and the value to students. You can read more on their feedback here.

If you’re a teacher or school administrator, and are interested in participating or have questions (did we mention that it's FREE for user?), please contact our Californian in Education team.

As always, we’d love to hear your constructive feedback and ideas. The site is in beta, so you can expect some wrinkles during development. But now's the time to help shape the vision.

Thanks.
 

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BakersfieldEZAds.com is our newest local website and is designed to give businesses and organizations more options to advertise in our products, whether digital or print.

BakersfieldEZAds is built around the concept of self-serve, which means we give you the tools to create your ads yourself in a matter of minutes. It’s convenient: open 24/7, easy credit-card payment, a variety of design options and the choice of audiences you want to reach. And you don’t need any special design or technical skills. You simply customize a preformatted template by adding your own advertising message, image or company logo.

Current offerings include print and online ad options in The Bakersfield Californian, The Californian’s Applause section, bakersfield.com, Bakersfield Life, Bakersfield Voice and Smart Shopper.

We plan to expand those offerings in the coming months.

BakersfieldEZAds is for print and online display ads; you can continue to place your self-serve classified ads on bakersfield.com.

As always, please share any constructive feedback or ideas.
 

Well, we finally discovered what was causing the "save as draft" bug on blog posts and rolled out the fix this morning. 

If you've been experiencing this problem, you'll notice that all the posts that you tried to save as drafts in the past are now in the unpublished section of your blog settings page. 

If you have any questions, please leave a comment. 

Thanks!

Justinian Hatfield, Sr. Product Manager

 Hi folks, 

This morning we made a change to the site that we hope will address the "blogs are slow" problems that some users have been experiencing. 

The problem stems from the system trying to count how many unread messages you have in your inbox. If you have lots (we're talking thousands) of unread messages, the blogs were slow because the software counted all the unread messages each time you visited a blog. 

We're no longer counting all of the unread messages on the blog pages, so you should see an improvement on the page load times. 

Thanks!

Justinian Hatfield, Sr. Product Manager

As I write this, we’re a few hours from going live with a new content-management system to publish staff news stories. The improvements for now are mostly under the hood, and we purposely tried to keep visible changes to a minimum  but we’ll be rolling out some very cool bells and whistles in the coming months.

For now, the most prominent changes you’ll notice will be some tweaks to the yellow navigation tabs near the top of most of our pages:

• The “Today’s Paper” tab has been replaced with “News,” which reflects the fact that much of the news content on bakersfield.com is not in the newspaper (and vice versa). We’ve also shuffled the order of the sublinks that appear when you mouse over the “News” tab they're now prioritized by popularity.
• The “Opinion” tab has been eliminated; the Opinion section link can now be found under the “News” tab. The Opinion tab simply got very little use so we collapsed the number of tabs.
• We added and deleted some of the subsection links underneath the tabs. Some links were added to reflect popular sections while others simply weren’t popular enough to warrant a homepage link. And we realize some of those tabs had so many links underneath them it was hard to navigate from one end to the other to click on the section you wanted.

With any major software installation, there are bound to be bugs. We’re sure you’ll find some yourself, so come Tuesday when we're live with the new system, take a look around and see if you see anything amiss. Let us know if you do. 

These changes are minor compared with some major changes coming to bakersfield.com and our other local sites this year. I’ll share more on those improvements as we get closer but rest assured we have a very busy year ahead.

Thanks,

Logan Molen
 

It's March Madness, which means men's and women's college basketball will consume the lives of many Americans. Always wanting to be of service, we're here to help feed that passoin with our interactive March Madness contest.

It'sFREE, fun, and easy. And if you do everything right, you can win a $1 million prize! Yeah, it's a longshot, but we know you're up to the challenge, right? Plus there are secondary prizes of $10,000 and $1,000, plus a variety of smaller prizes courtesy of our local sponsor, Tilted Kilt.

Cool contest tools include:

• The ability to play against private groups you want to create. Invite your friends, family and co-workers to play, and find out who really has skills.
• Regularly updated stats for each team
• Your own personal stats
• Message board and a fan photo gallery
• The ability to play on your smartphone via our 661411.com mobile website. Just click on the March Madness Tourney link on the homepage.

Pre-registration is open, but you can play at any time during the tourney (although you need to play all games if you want a crack at the top prizes).

Good luck!

--Logan Molen

 We've just launched a few new mobile features to serve our customers on the go. 

First, our Version 3.0 mobile site, renamed as 661411.com, has launched in live beta (which means we still have some bugs to work out and would love your input on what's working and what's not).  You can reach 661411 through your desktop browser, but the formatting is intended for cell phones or smart devices. 

With 661411, we're trying to deliver news that makes sense for people on the go, such as:

• Live local and Southern California traffic conditions
• Current weather
• Local breaking news
• Local entertainment and sports news
• A local dining guide (this still needs lots of work) 
• Mobile photos from people like you
• Latest local classified ads
• Recent bakersfield.com blog posts
• Latest posts from the MoneyTalks blog

We're hoping to launch an iPhone/iTouch-specific version of 661411 in a few weeks, but for now the site shows up fine on those devices. And we'll be adding a local events calendar shortly as well. 

Second, iPhone or iPod Touch users who use the Mobile News Network app from The Associated Press can now find Bakersfield Californian stories under the Local News section. All you need to do is select "Edit" near the top of the screen and put in your local ZIP or, if you're currently in the Bakersfield area, select "Find Current Location"  and the app will plot your location and serve you Californian stories. 

Finally, you can visit bakersfield.com for more detail on our mobile web and text-message services. 

 ... at The Bakersfield Californian and bakersfield.com as a result of an outage downtown this morning. We're not sure when service will be restored. 

If you have urgent customer service questions, you can email us:

• Newspaper delivery issues
• Classified ad placement
• News tips

Thanks for your patience. 

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We continue to build out our Inside Guide local business directory on bakersfield.com, and will end the year with more than 10,000 individual listings for local businesses big and small.

The newest categories include Arts & Entertainment, Education, Business & Professional Services, and Legal & Finance.

We’ll end the year with just about 4,000 individual reviews from more than 1,400 different bakersfield.com readers. Based on the sharp increase in traffic over the last 60 days, I expect that’ll grow quickly.

If you’re a business owner, you can claim your business listing for free and in just a few minutes. The benefits include increased exposure for your business, the ability to enhance your listing and the opportunity to interact with customers. Basically, you have your own page on bakersfield.com. To date, more than 750 local businesses have claimed their Inside Guide listings.

We'll be rolling out more categories in the coming weeks, and will continue to work to improve the experience for all. As always, we'd love to hear any constructive feedback. 

--Logan Molen
 

Winter is here and it’s actually chilly (OK, it’s cold for some of us flatlanders). With the holidays upon us, what better time to put the fireplace to use, right?

With that in mind, we’ve just launched a new SMS “burn alert” for those folks who have fireplaces and live within the San Joaquin Valley portion of Kern County. Each day during cold months, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District decides whether the air quality is good enough for people to burn wood the next day. If it’s a burn day, you’re cool to fire up. If it’s a no-burn day, you’re not supposed to light a fire and might be fined if you’re caught. Right or wrong, that’s the policy.

To start receiving our free Burn alerts, simply text BURN to 21321 and follow the instructions.

We also offer free local school-delay alerts and Air Quality forecasts. You can get details in this previous BdotCOM post.

Still looking for that perfect holiday gift? Check out our new Video Gift Guide, which highlights a variety of local businesses selling interesting items.

Gift ideas range from designer fashion and crafts to “green” products and cosmetic surgery. There’s even a spot for an AR-15 rifle.

Support your local businesses that help keep bakersfield.com free.