I was poking through some of our site stats today, and I continue to be overwhelmed by the growing traffic we're getting through RSS feeds.

We've offered RSS feeds (also known as web feeds) for many of our news features for awhile but will be spending more time developing these in the coming months and doing more to explain how they work and how to subscribe.

I mention this now because the new version of Internet Explorer (IE 7.0) was just released, and already is fast becoming popular among our site visitors. IE 7 in many ways simply catches Microsoft up with Firefox and Safari in terms of features. But one neat improvement is a button embedded into the toolbar that makes it super easy to add RSS feeds. Knowing that Microsoft's automated updates will bring IE 7 to more users than a normal browser update, I'm hopeful more everyday surfers (as opposed to the tech geeks) will learn to harness the power of RSS.

For those of you who do use RSS, what feed reader do you use?

I used to use Feedster but now am trying out Google Reader.

Mike Griffith, The Californian's longtime hockey beat writer, has launched his first blog, Condors Talk. It's all things about Bakersfield's most popular sports team.

There are other local blogs on the Condors (see Bobblehead on Condors, The Neutral Zone and the stale Condorstown), each of which have their own charms. But none feature Griffith, who has covered local hockey from the glory days of the Oilers and Fog (and he's old enough to remember the Kernals). He's also a solid beer-league hockey player, although he's been on the DL the past few seasons. So, he knows a bit of which he speaks.

Stop in and give Mike a piece of your mind. If you know Mike, you'll know he'll enjoy the debate.

Beginning today, we've introduced a security feature on bakersfield.com's People pages called a "Captcha test" that is designed to keep automated "bots" from delivering spam onto our blogs, profiles, etc.

These Captcha tests, which are common all over the Web, are basically images that contain a collection of letters and numbers. We'll ask you to type in the characters you see in the image.Think of it like a password to get your posts online. If you don't type in the characters, your stuff won't get online.

We understand it's one more step in the process, but the upside is blogs and People pages that will be free of spam from automated bots.

Here are the pages where you can expect to have to fill out the Captcha info:
    - Registration screen
    - Contacting a user from their profile when signed in
    - Rating someone
    - Inviting friends through the Invite Friends form
    - Replying privately to a posting
    - Posting a public comment
    - Signing a guestbook

Thanks for your understanding. As always, give us your feedback or any other suggestions on how to improve the experience on bakersfield.com.

Halloween is less than two weeks away, but we've been busy at bakersfield.com feeding with our Halloween Haunts blog.

It's a ton of fun, and features stuff like:

--A thread on haunted buildings in Bakersfield. Check out which places your fellow bloggers say are haunted.

--What's your favorite scary movie? We've got a bunch of reader comments, but no clear favorite yet.

--Help us write a scary story. We started it, you finish it.

--A, um, Pet Halloween costume contest. The photo we've included in the original post is not to be believed. It's kinda sad, actually.

Anyhoo, check out the site for those things, recipes and much more.

Awhile back, Davin McHenry, The Californian's web editor, launched an online map of local bloggers and blog readers. There was a bit of momentum initially, but then we moved to a new blogging system and the whole map thing kinda fell by the wayside.

I'd like to jumpstart the concept again, building on what we've started

So, if you read or write blogs on Bakersfield.com (or elsewhere locally), take a few minutes to add your info to the Bakersfield Blog Readers map. It's easy and really drives home the reach local blogs have online. So far, we're showing 26 bloggers or readers in Bakersfield and a half dozen states. I know there are thousands more, so it's time to represent.

You may have noticed something different on parts of Bakersfield.com beginning today (if you didn’t, visit our homepage or multimedia library and take a look around).

Three main improvements:

1. You’ll find a slideshow at the top of the homepage that highlights some of the good stuff inside Bakersfield.com on any given day.
2. You’ll see our new Flash video player embedded on a variety of pages, including the homepage. We launched the Flash player and the multimedia library page to put a greater emphasis on the daily video and audio we’re producing.
3. We’ve added an area on our homepage to promote Featured Coverage from our newsroom. You’ll continue to find the latest local and breaking news on the homepage as you have before.

Here are some details on the changes:

Rotating Slides

Near the top of the home page you’ll see an image, with tabs along the top. We’ll use this area to promote content from throughout the site. You can either use the tabs at the top to manually scroll through the slides or you can use the player settings at the lower right to have the slides scroll automatically.

These slides will change during the day, so check back regularly to see what’s changed.

Video

We’ve been offering a variety of video on Bakersfield.com for years, but we’ve dramatically increased the number of local news videos this year. The popularity of those videos has grown dramatically, so we’re giving greater prominence to those clips and making them easier to watch.

What we’ve done is launched a Flash video player that is embedded on pages throughout the site. Previously, you had to download the file, which took a bit of time. On the homepage, you’ll see a smaller player packaged with a sampling of recent clips (use the scrollbar to see them all). In the multimedia library pages, you’ll find links to much more local video, as well as a larger player. And for those videos related to an accompanying story, you’ll find a video player embedded with the story.

Watching these videos requires versions of Flash 8 or 9. The large majority of our users have versions of that software, so most of you will be able to enjoy our clips immediately. If you have an older version of Flash or don’t have it at all, we’ve included instructions on how to upgrade within the player (and you really should upgrade, if you want to effectively navigate the Web, not just Bakersfield.com).

Let us know what you think of the changes. There are a few bugs we’re working on, and we’re going to be fine-tuning things here and there.  But I think you’ll find this to be a better experience.

Featured news coverage

We’ve added an area to promote Featured Coverage from our newsroom. The Bakersfield Californian has more reporters than all other local news agencies combined, and we’ll be using this space to highlight the rich local coverage you won’t find anywhere else.

And we’ll continue to update the site with the latest breaking news throughout the day. You'll be able to quickly see what's new and updated thanks to some small red buttons we'll attach next to those stories.

Bakersfield.com is working with concert promoters to alert you of the latest local concerts. As soon as we find out about a local show that's of general interest, we'll send out a text-message alert to our SMS subscribers. Be among the first to hear about cool performers -- or even has-been favorites -- coming to town.

If you don't know, text messages (English for Short Message Service) are send out to wireless devices like cell phones, Treos and Sidekicks.

Bakersfield.com offers a variety of other text-message alerts (breaking news, prep football scores, daily headlines, weather).  Visit our SMS subscription page to sign up for the Concert Alerts as well as any other alerts that sound interesting. You can also get to this page through the "My Subscriptions" button on your personal profile pages.

And let us know if there are other alerts you'd like to get on your phone.

Bakersfield Preps is THE place to go for in-depth local high school sports coverage. But you knew that already, right?

Now, BP is even better with the addition of Brighthouse High School Football Game of the Week video highlights. Visit the main Bakersfield Preps page, scroll down to the Game of the Week feature and click on "play." Life has never been more simple.

We just posted highlights of Friday's West at Ridgeview game. Brighthouse shows a game live every Friday (digital customers only) and replays the game Saturday and  makes it available for later on-demand viewing.

But if you don't have the time to watch the game or don't have digital cable, check the Bakersfield Preps site early the following week for the highlights.

Let us know what you think.