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Quick update on what we’re doing/have done to improve blog page-loading times:
Bakomatic, our home-grown platform that powers our blogs, Inside Guide, classifieds and a few other things, is pretty complex. It not only powers about half of Bakersfield.com but also most of our other...
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If you love prep football, you’ll want to check out a new feature for us this year: student-produced video game coverage.
Each video is shot and edited by students from participating schools. We’re averaging about three videos per week, and fresh videos are posted a few days after...
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New & Improved Inside Guide to Bakersfield We’re in the process of upgrading the Inside Guide and today we launched lots of cool new features: New Business Profile pages:The business listings have a fresh new look! It’s easier to find out what other reviewers think....
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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....
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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'...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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Quick shoutout about some recent industry recognition for bakersfield.com:
Online News Association on Saturday announced its annual awards for digital journalism. Going into the awards, Bakersfield.com was a finalist for “Outstanding Use of Digital Media” among smaller sites for...
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Bakersfield.com inadvertently send out a test news alert via email and text message this morning.
This test, which contained some gibberish, shouldn't have gone out to our many thousands of News Alert subscribers -- but it did. And for that we apologize.
We've reviewed our procedures and...
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It's football season, which means it's also time for Beat the Experts, our annual interactive feature that pits you, the amateur, against some of the smartest football minds in Bakersfield!
OK, maybe that last comment is an exaggeration if you take it literally (and some of you sure will),...
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If you’ve been searching for homes to buy (and it’s certainly a buyer’s market right now), you know how valuable a map can be in terms of finding homes in specific parts of town.
We’ve just added a mapping feature to our Homes section that gives you one more option to...
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The Californian newsroom and readers have been having fun trying to narrow down a list of Kern’s Seven Wonders, playing off last month’s vote for a fresh batch of seven from around the world.
First, we had the active “The seven wonders … of Kern County?” post in...
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If you're a subscriber to our Daily Digest email newsletter (and many of you are; it's our second-most popular newsletter), you've become accustomed to a pretty generic daily overview of The Californian's news and opinion delivered every day at 6 a.m. Pacific.
On Tuesday, we...
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You might have noticed the return of Bakosphere, a group blog tucked in that ever-growing spot where Bakersfield and the Web collide.
Bakosphere originally was launched in December 2005 on the Typepad blogging platform that once powered all of Bakersfield.com's blogs. After periodic bursts of...
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Our online Bid & Buy Auction is just a few days away from going live. Bidding will open at 9 a.m. on Sunday, May 6, and run through 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 15.
You can get a preview of the hundreds of items up for auction at the Bid & Buy preview site. I've got my eye on the flying...
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We’ve been diving into the world of mapping in recent months, and are getting favorable response from readers.
Our Pothole Map has drawn lots of activity locally as well as interest from far away (check out the post from Germany); it's even helped to prompt several potholes to get...
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This morning we launched an overhaul to our Classfied section. A lot of the improvements are technical and will lay the foundation for even more cool stuff to come soon. But for now, the changes feature:
Easier-to-use design
Larger photos
A list of the most popular ads...
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Today's meetup of bakersfield.com bloggers and contributors was a lot of fun.
We had about a dozen bloggers show up for coffee, cookies, conversation, and some bakersfield.com swag. And it was great to see TomW, who was visiting from the Bay area.
It was great to meet some of...
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We love all the great people who create stuff on Bakersfield.com, whether it’s blog posts or comments, ratings or reviews on our new Inside Guide, personal profiles or Your Words stories.
That’s why we’ve launched a new weekly email newsletter called Ngage, which highlights...
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Sometimes I marvel that someone actually pays me to work for bakersfield.com. I mean, I work at a great place for and with great people who dream big and strive to get better each day. And add to that, we have great readers who share their time and passion to make our site more...
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At Bakersfield.com, we love to engage our visitors, whether it’s through news or advertising or through our growing online community.
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
...
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Today we launched a cleaner version of our People page, plus added a few new features.
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...
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It's been awhile since we've added new choices of desktop wallpaper, but we did just that this week.
You can check out the new wallpapers in our Photography section. Each photo comes in five different sizes to fit your screen resolution.
And, we pledge to be more frequent in updating this...
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We’ve just launched a fun section called Applause.
Applause is a spot for news to celebrate: Weddings, anniversaries, engagements for now, and later births, graduations and other announcements.
You’ll find lots of names and photos, as well as fun interactive features like a...
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On Monday, The Californian launched “Californian Update,” a weekday afternoon edition published in PDF format (in letter-size format, for easy printing) and available only through Bakersfield.com. You can download the debut issue to take a look.
Each 6-page edition will be...
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I’m proud to announce that Bakersfield.com has been nominated for a Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge award for Best Overall News Site for newspapers with less than 75,000 daily circulations.
We’re competing against two other very good sites –...
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Happy New Year!
It's been awhile since I've posted, but I'm back in the saddle and ready to rock this year.
I wanted to let people know we'll be trying to give away lots of loot this year as rewards to our loyal readers. So, you'll want to regularly check out our Contests page for things...
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If you're a fan of local racing or even local history, you must listen to the weekly podcast Billy Simkins and Lee Jensen have started on their Dirt Racin' Station. They're also streaming their shows on bakersfield.com (thanks, guys!).
Of particular note is Sunday's interview with Spud...
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We at Bakersfield.com have been stunned by the generosity of so many local people who have contributed goods and money to our holiday homeless project.
On Wednesday, these two wonderful children (shown to your left) stopped by our offices to donate items for the project. Kaleb, 7, and Naomi...
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Bakersfield.com has launched its bigger and better Jobs section, which is loaded with new features and a new look. We think it continues to be the best source of local jobs anywhere!
For job seekers, our new features allow you to:
Search ads by any number of possibilities,...
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Ever dreamed of Bakersfield on the Beach, like in the old days? (OK, so it was a million years ago, when we were under water here, but it did happen). Anyway, Bakersfield is once again beachfront property, this time in the virtual world of Second Life.
If you’re new to the concept of...
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I read an interesting item today about product development at a software company called 37 Signals. The gist was that most product development is centered on questions like “what feature do you think is missing?” or “If you could add just one thing, what would it be?”
All...
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The Californian's annual Share the Season series kicked off Thanksgiving Day, and will run through Christmas Day.
Share the Season was conceived as a way to connect a few of Kern County's less fortunate families with readers of The Californian and bakersfield.com
Each year, the...
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Bakersfield.com will periodically be working with promoters to offer discounted prices on local concerts.
The price breaks will be for concerts here and there, and will be solely last-minute deals. We'll be letting people know about these deals via one of our text message features called...
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Want to know if you can sleep in when your school declares a fog delay? Of course you do!
So, how's this for simple: Bakersfield.com will send you a text message to your cell phone as soon as the school district of your choice issues a fog delay. No need to check a website or wait...
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One of the upgrades to our software that I mentioned awhile back is around the corner.
And upgrade to version 2.0 of our Bakomatic blogging/profile software is scheduled for 1 to 2 a.m. Monday. The install will require us to shut down access to the blogs and profile pages during that time.
...
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The Californian's Opinion page staff (which operates separately from the newsroom) has been diving into multimedia and they're regularly publishing video editorials.
You can find them packaged in the video editorials box at the top of the Opinion section.
Not many newspapers are doing...
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I’m pleased to announce that Jason Sperber has joined the bakersfield.com crew as our Community Content Coordinator. Jason is an accomplished blogger in his own right, and is a great addition to our team.
This is the first time we’ve had this kind of position, and...
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The big election is less than a week away. That means it's time to do your homework.
Our Election 2006 section features:
--all The Californian's local stories.
--links to endorsements from The Californian editorial board.
--The ever-popular and irreverent Election Dish podcasts.
--Links...
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We’re planning to install a major upgrade to the software that delivers our email newsletters, and to accomplish that, we’re going to shut down the mail server for an extended time beginning this afternoon. That means some newsletters (such as News Alerts, Oil News, and possibly...
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Halloween is less than two weeks away, but we've been busy at bakersfield.com feeding with our Halloween Haunts blog.
It's a ton of fun, and features stuff like:
--A thread on haunted buildings in Bakersfield. Check out which places your fellow bloggers say are haunted.
--What's your...
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As we roll out new features on bakersfield.com (and we've got a bunch this year), it's important that we get honest feedback from real people during the development process so that when we do launch, we've minimized the bugs and improved usability (how's that for a $10 word?) for a diverse group...
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