Bakotopia.com relaunches with new look, new platform

The site wallpaper ranges from the wild to the mutedFive-year-old Bakotopia.com has just relaunched with a long-overdue redesign that emphasizes the site's strengths in blogging and social interaction around local entertainment and whacks dead wood that built up over the years.

Some of the highlights:

• A greater emphasis on what you want to read. We pruned some of the stuff that just wasn't getting traffic and put more focus on the things people were using.
• A livelier logo.
• Dozens of different wallpapers that change regularly with each new page. Our long-term goal is to let our readers and artists in the community design future wallpapers. 
• A widget that pulls in entertainment stories from bakersfield.com.The new design pulls in a PDF of The Californian's Thursday Eye on Entertainment section We know Bakotopia is something of an alternative to The Californian, but we also know The Californian delivers local entertainment news Bakotopia readers are interested in.
• More promotion for the weekly Bakotopia Radio show on KRAB 106.1 FM, which features local music and exclusive live performances.

We're publishing the site with the open-source Drupal publishing system. For most of its list, Bakotopia has been published with our homegrown Bakomatic publishing platform. The award-winning Bakomatic platform featured integrated social-networking, blogging, story posting, band profiles, streaming radio and more. But as time went on, the costs of building and maintaining our own publishing software simply became too great and other open-source platforms became more advanced. As a result, we have started to migrate our local sites from Matt Munoz's mug on the Bakotopia entertainment calendar signifies a hot pick.Bakomatic to Drupal. Bakotopia is the most recent to make the leap.

We'll also soon launch a redesigned email newsletter to replace the "dirty" version we've published for years. 

As with any new design and/or relaunch on a new platform, bugs are inevitable. We're chasing a variety of gremlins but you can help by passing along any details if you run across anything goofy. And by all means please share any other feedback. We consider this version a work in progress toward a major overhaul of our entertainment presence online.