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Our People section and Inside Guide are the fastest-growing areas of our site, and to spotlight some of the great stuff our readers are posting, we’ve launched a weekly e-mail newsletter titled ngage.

Yep, ngage. Get it? We thought we'd have a little fun with the name, rather than be all formal and stilted.

ngage, will be sent out every Thursday, and will include a buncha fun stuff, all focused on the great content our visitors are sharing.

Community Content Coordinator Jason Sperber will be putting it together. Here’s Jason’s mission for ngage:

“Every issue, I'll be sifting through the previous week's activity, looking for cool stuff to bring to your attention: popular posts ("Hot Topics"), interesting topics or comment threads ("Featured Posts"), appetite-whetting restaurant reviews, readers' wedding stories, and local blogs to check out. Plus each week's issue will feature a profile of one of your online neighbors here--it could be you!"

Our first issue, published last week, highlighted:

• Blogger Marshall Neal (aka Marsh)
• A Your Words story by Misty Patrick on NASCAR racing.
• Links to hot blog topics and featured posts on Bakersfield.com
• A local blog by "Glutton that focuses on local cuisine.
• “Termite’s” review of Thai cuisine.
•  

 To subscribe to engage, visit our Newsletters page. It's free and easy to sign up.

 As always, we’d love your feedback.

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The biggest Kern County trial in years has just started, and we’ve created an in-depth section to help you stay on top of developments.

 “The Trial of Vincent Brothers”  features:

• An interactive Flash feature that breaks out detail on the people involve in the case, a timeline and a crime scene map.
• Every story The Californian has ever published on the case.
• Daily news updates.
• A blog with frequent trial updates.
• Regularly updated video.
• A new email newsletter that provides instant updates on important trial developments.
• Photo galleries.

 As always, we’d love to get your feedback on the section itself. If you have comments regarding the trial or case itself, please leave those in the Trial Blog.

This is a head's up that bakersfield.com will be offline between 1:30 and 4:30 a.m. Sunday. Our systems folks are going to be tinkering with some things to make life better, easier, faster and more rewarding for all of us.

The actual downtime likely will be less than that, but we want to give people a wide enough window so they're not camped out on pins and needles waiting for the curtain to be pulled up again. In other words, for those on the West Coast, it means you'll need to find something else to do after the bars close (think Cartoon Network). For those on the East Coast, it means you can sleep in a little longer (who says we're not looking out for our customers?).

Jason gave early warning about this on Friday in Blogging Bako; I'm also posting about it so that word gets as far as wide as possible. We want to limit the threat of looting and otherwise minimize public outcry.

Seriously, thanks for your patience and understanding. We try to take the site down only when we absolutely have to, and we try to do it when most people are asleep or otherwise away from their computers.

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You may have noticed that we’ve added a pulldown menu to our search engine at the top of each page.

While this does add an extra step to your searches, it will improve your results. We’re having difficulty consolidating all the search engines for the various features on Bakersfield.com, so this was the best short-term solution. We continue to pursue a one-stop solution that will consolidate all those search engines into one place.

As always, we welcome your feedback and ideas.

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We have just launched Inside Guide to Dining, an interactive directory that lets you to rate and review local restaurants. As time goes on, we’ll be expanding Inside Guide into other categories by rolling out listings for more local businesses. Think of it as Yellow Pages on steroids.

Initially, we’re focusing on restaurants because we know people love to eat and tell others about their favorite places and little secrets. And because there are so many great restaurants in Bakersfield, dining is a natural place for us to start.

Through Inside Guide to Dining, you can:

• Rate and review restaurants. Recent reviews are here.
• Search local restaurants by any number of categories, including cuisine,popularity in terms of regular customers, by top rankings and by specialty.
• Sign on to become a “Regular Customer” of your favorite restaurants. Your profile will be linked from the restaurant’s page to your own personal profile.
• Read reviews from Pete Tittl, The Bakersfield Californian’s restaurant critic.
• Become a “trusted reviewer” by 1) posting at least 10 reviews and 2) having at least seven people giving your review a “thumb’s up.” Trusted reviewers are designated with a red check mark next to their user name.

The Inside Guide is tied into Bakersfield.com’s People features. So, if you already have set up a profile on Bakersfield.com or are blogging, you can start right away with the ratings and reviews. If you haven’t yet set up a profile, it’s quick and easy and free. 

We will be monitoring the stuff that you post, so please mind your manners. Don’t waste your time or ours by posting garbage that’s not fit for a public forum. As with the blogs, we ask that you follow our Terms of Use. Bottom line is, be good people.

We built this whole Inside Guide system from scratch, so naturally there will be bugs. We invited some of our local bloggers to share in the beta testing, and they gave us valuable feedback.

We think what is online is pretty good, but we know it can get better.  There will be things we didn’t think of or have yet to launch because we’re still working on them. As with all our site features, old or new, we value your feedback. We take your questions and suggestions seriously, and believe strongly in letting you share in our development.

If you don't have feedback to share about the Inside Guide itself, how about posting some of your own ratings and reviews?

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• A cleaner design that better displays some of the great content being created by our readers. This is a huge improvement over our previous design.
  
• A searchable A-Z list of all our community blogs, of which there are currently more than 430.
• A list of the "100 most connected" people on bakersfield.com. Where do you rank?
• A new rich-editor feature that makes it easier to submit events listings or "citizen journalism" stories to our newsroom for possible publication in the Your Words section of The Bakersfield Californian and bakersfield.com.
• The ability to easily add a localized map to your blog posts, like the one to the left showing where I'm posting this from. You can get more detail on this mapping feature in Dan's Diner.