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