“We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better...stronger...faster.” —“The Six Million Dollar Man”

This weekend, we’re upgrading Bakersfield.com to version 2.0 of the software platform that runs all the features you love so much—profiles, blogs, comments, and all our other community-based interactive stuff.

Here’s your heads-up:  The upgrade will necessitate a site outage from about 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. PST early Monday morning (or late Sunday night, for you nocturnal webizens who do your surfing long after I’ve crashed).  That means that, for that one-hour period, you won’t be able to register as a new user or access the blogs or comments to either view or post.  If you’re already a registered user and logged on before the outage, you will be able to read news stories (but you might run into some problems if you’ve cleared your cache and gotten rid of cookies on your computer before the upgrade starts).

What to expect once it’s done?  Well, like Steve Austin, 2.0 will make your favorite online community that much faster and more stable.  (Your profile and blog URLs will change, but the old URLs should still work and be redirected automatically to the new ones.)

No new features are being rolled out this time….  But rest assured that this upgrade lays the groundwork for a whole mess of cool new toys and new interactive features that will enhance your Bakersfield.com experience in the next few months.  Stay tuned to this blog for details as they come.

Our development team has been working hard to make sure that this upgrade goes smoothly and your experience, once you log in Monday morning, is as bug-free as possible.  (We’ve even gotten help beta-testing from generous B.com community members; thank you, and keep an eye out for future opportunities to help.)  So, if you do encounter problems next week or after, please leave a comment here or e-mail me directly.  And as always, your feedback, positive and negative, and your ideas for the future are always sought after and welcome.

See you on the other side!