We’ve just launched our first Holiday Gift Guide, a collection of shopping ideas from local businesses.

We’ll be adding items between now and Christmas, so you’ll want to visit often. But for now you can find nearly 100 items priced from under $25 to more than $100. Items range from 10th Anniversary Condors jerseys and tools to perfumes and dog gifts. There’s even booze, in the form of high-end tequilas.

The Holiday Gift Guide also includes the return of Beyond the Bag, our staff shopping blog that highlights great sales, unique items and gift ideas. If you run across a great deal or idea during your shopping adventures, share your find with us.

Happy shopping!

We know you like to eat. C'mon, admit it.

So how about contributing to our “Favorite Dish" map, an interactive feature in which we want you to tell us which restaurants serve up your favorite dish? So far, we have dishes ranging from mushroom ravioli at Joseph’s and margaritas at La Mina to Cajun seafood omelettes at 24th Street café? What do you have to add?

And be sure to check out some of the other evergreen maps we’ve launched earlier in the year. There's a ton of fun and useful information packed into that section

What are other maps you’d like to see us launch or that you’d love to contribute to? Share a good idea and there's a good chance we'll pursue it.

You might notice that we’ve made some changes to what we call our top-level navigation, also known as our “tabs.” They’re the orange tabs at the top of many of our pages (although not on our blog pages, like this one; that's a story for another day).

Beginning today, we launched new templates that feature a renamed tab (Local Business has been renamed Inside Guide to reflect the product brand) and a new tab titled Images, which will take you to a page featuring Snap! and staff photos, video and wallpaper. In addition, we’ve added and moved some of the links that you see when you mouseover any of those tabs. The whole idea is to make it easier for people to find stuff without turning our pages into a blob of ever-growing links.

Until we tackle a sitewide redesign, we periodically have to tweak the tabs and the links underneath them to highlight new features or sections or help people where get where they want to go.

Because portions of our site are hosted in various locations and by a few third parties, some sections will still have the old look for a few days (for example, our news stories are served from Raleigh, N.C., or Sacramento, while our blog posts and classifieds are served from Dallas). But that shouldn’t cause you any problem since the links on those pages still work.

You’d think changes like this would be pretty straightforward, but in an age when information is free-form and elements of our site are served from multiple locations, there are all kinds of “seams” in the navigation that we have to address. Thanks to thoughtful guides like Information Architecture we have resources that help us bring some sense to the chaos. But in the process, we may have missed a key link somewhere. If there are sections or pages that you have difficulty finding, let me (lmolen@bakersfield.com) know and we’ll see how we can make things better.

Today, we started implementing Google enterprise search into bakersfield.com. It's been a long time coming, and I figured, why not go with the best. Unlike the Google hosted and co-branded versions, we're actually operating a standalone server called a Google Search Appliance, so we'll have more operational control than most sites using Google.

Right now, we're using Google for specific portions of the site, such as news, classifieds, blogs, profiles and Inside Guide reviews. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll roll in other portions of our site. My goal is to try to condense as many features into one sitewide search engine, rather than the seven to nine we’ve been using for most of the year.

For now, consider our Google search in beta. Out of the gate, there are some bugs we’re sorting through. Some of the hot-linked headers in the search results are very helpful (for example, on specific blog posts, we want to pull in actual headlines or topics, rather than just the name of the blog). But even with bugs, it’s an improvement on what we had, which tended to be incomplete and short on relevance. Once we get the basics worked out, we’ll start rolling out all kinds of bells and whistles.

During this process, we’ve been looking at various sites that have good search-results pages or search interfaces. but we're still looking for good ideas to borrow. A few I like are Reuters and Apple. What sites do you think have great search experiences, and why?

Everyone has done something good that’s deserving of a photo and headline, so we’re making it possible to remember those occasions that deserve a bit of special recognition.

We’re now offering personalized gifts in which you can commemorate special occasions such as weddings, anniversaries, graduations, birthdays, athletic accomplishments, you name it, with a customized front page.

The process is simple: You pick a newspaper masthead - The Bakersfield Californian, Mas or Tehachapi News – upload your personal photo, select the wording that fits your occasion, then attach it to a variety of products ranging from prints and shirts to mousepads and coffee cups – even puzzles.  You pay us through a secure form, and days later your personalized product is shipped directly to you.

How easy is that?

Bakersfield.com is testing a variety of "widgets" that pull our content onto your blog or website. They're super easy to use, and we'd like you to help test them for us as we roll through this beta phase.

Widgets are chunks of code that you can embed into your own blog, site or personalized pages like iGoogle. It's a way to get bakersfield.com content without having to visit our site. Not that we don't want you to actually visit the site, but we realize you're busy getting into trouble elsewhere on the Web.

So far, we've created widgets for:

• The latest bakersfield.com headlines
• A local events calendar
• Most recent blog posts
• Most recent reviews
• Top-rated businesses

We'll add more as we polish the presentation, add a Frequently Asked Questions element and work through any bugs.

But we need to hear from you as to what widgets you'd like to see, what features you like/don't like, etc. You can leave your constructive feedback below or email me.

Thanks.

In conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the Bakersfield Condors, we've launched a new Condors section that is full of fun stuff.

In addition to Mike Griffith's Californian beat coverage that you've come to trust over the years, you'll find:

• Exclusive voting for the Condors' 10th anniversary team. Our tools allow you to pick up to 10 teams -- including your choice for tough guy enforcer -- from a pool of the top goalies, forwards, centers and d-men from the last 10 years. If you've played our Beat the Experts football contest, you can sign right in and start creating your own-all-star team. Otherwise, you just need to fill out a quick registration form before getting started. Participants are eliglble for a bunch of cool prizes, including Condors season tickets.
• The latest posts from Griffith's Condors Talk blog.
• A Condors poll.
• Sign-ups for mobile game score alerts for home and away games. We've just started offering these, and they're proving to be very popular.
• A fun Flash game that looks an awful lot like Pong -- but is still addictive (he shoots, he scoooooooooooores!).
• Condors Wallpapers, featuring great photos you'll want to make your computer wallpaper.
• Schedule of upcoming games.