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Last year, Bakersfield.com launched its SNAP! community photo galleries by sending local students to their schools' varsity football games, taking photos of the crowd, handing out cards telling their subjects that they'd been "snapped," and uploading their photos to our website every weekend.

Well, it's that time of year again, and we're looking for folks with a digital camera, a high-speed internet connect, and a love of the Friday night lights to SNAP! the attendees at varsity football games for the following schools:

• Bakersfield Christian Eagles
• Bakersfield High Drillers
• Centennial Golden Hawks
• East High Blades
• Foothill Trojans
• Frontier Titans
• Garces Rams
• Golden Valley Bulldogs
• Highland Scots
• Liberty Patriots
• North High Stars
• Ridgeview Wolf Pack
• South High Rebels
• Stockdale Mustangs
• West High Vikings
• Bakersfield College

The links above go to each school's gallery from last season, so you can check out what our Snappers shot last year.  We'd especially like to recruit folks with a relationship to each school--students, alumni, parents, booster club members, neighborhood supporters, faculty and staff.  A small stipend will be available to photographers who commit to going to a full season of local games, as well as to any back-up or floater photographers who may be available.

Interested?  Please get in touch with us via email as soon as possible, and spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested.  Thanks!

It may be hard to believe amid this current heat streak, but temperatures in Bakersfield sometimes fall below 100 degrees (seriously, look it up). And sometimes those temps actually fall to levels where you might have to think about whether to wear a coat or think twice about washing your car. Before you know it, frost will be here and you’ll be trying to figure out whether to cover your plants or let Spot spend the night inside. 

So, to help you plan your days, we’re now offering daily SMS weather forecasts for Bakersfield. SMS stands for Short Message Service, short (160 characters or less) text messages delivered to your phone or mobile device.

Here’s the best part: We’ll send these alerts to you for free (although standard text messaging fees from your cell provider will apply) and you can determine what time of day you want to receive them. We know they’re popular: We’ve just launched the forecast alerts and already have nearly 200 subscribers.

To sign up, you can either:

• Text the word "forecast" to 47645 and follow the subscription-confirmation directions
• Visit our Mobile Alerts page, and click on “Daily Forecast.” After you sign in with your name and phone number, you’ll go to a page where you can subscribe to the Daily Forecast, and many other local alerts from bakersfield.com, including breaking news, school fog delays, Condors game scores, even cool stuff we give away to our Freebies & Offers list. After you've submitted your info, you'll be sent a message on your phone, asking you to confirm your subscription.

Once you've confirmed your subscription on your phone, you're all set.

If you have questions about our mobile services or SMS, check out these Frequently Asked Questions. 
 
And let us know if there are other local mobile alerts you’d like to receive. We can’t do everything, but we know there’s more to be done.

--Logan Molen
 

As the presidential race hits high gear, we’re expanding our election coverage on bakersfield.com. The newest feature is a partnership with Politico.com, a national political website that’s built a reputation for big scoops (including last week’s brouhaha over the candidates' home ownership), investigative journalism and incisive analysis.

--Logan Molen

The vendor bakersfield.com uses to send its email newsletters surprised us with last-minute notice that they were going to be doing major upgrades to their servers this weekend, beginning at 7 a.m. Pacific today.  They've told us we won't be able to send any email through late Sunday night. That's of great interest to the 10,000-plus subscribers to the Daily Digest, News Alerts or Weird News newsletters. The Daily Digest and Weird News newsletters will eventually be delivered, but only after the system is restored.

On one hand, we're happy our vendor is upgrading its infrastructure. But, cripes, you'd think with something this big -- which obviously required months of planning -- they could give us more than a half-day notice. But that's not your problem, it's ours. We'll try to make the best of it and improve things moving forward.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

--Logan Molen

This afternoon we released an update to the software that powers Bakersfield.com's blogging and community features.

One of the fixes that we included was a new version of the Rich Text Editor. What’s the Rich Text Editor? It’s the three rows of icons above the text box that you use to format the text of your blogs, articles, and comments.

The prior version of the RTE wasn’t compatible with the latest FireFox browser (version 3). In fact, it wouldn’t even show up! But now, the blogging platform is compatible with FireFox 3, so if you haven’t already, head over to www.getfirefox.com and download it.

If you experience any problems with the RTE, you might need to clear your cache. In Internet Explorer hold down the CTRL key and then hit your browser’s reload button. In Firefox it’s the same process, but you hold down the Shift key instead.

Google maps are back!
You may have noticed that the Google maps disappeared from blog posts and articles. Well, I’m happy to report that they are back.

Changes to the BdotCOM blog
You'll be seeing more posts from the BdotCOM blog in the coming months. We're going to use this blog to talk about new features on the site and interesting things other users are doing. You'll be seeing posts from a variety of people, including Jason Sperber, Logan Molen, Mary Lou Fulton, Ryan Pedigo, and Justinian Hatfield (that's me).

We're also going to be giving the BdotCOM blog a new look, so stay tuned for that.

- Justinian Hatfield, Sr. Product Manager