Pacific NW Portal Maintenance

If you were using Pacific Northwest Portal today, you probably noticed the RSS feeds had some trouble loading. Rest assured that it was just temporary maintenance. By tomorrow morning, things should be back to normal.

As always, our goal is to deliver you a better website. We think better performance is worth a few hours of sporadic feed outages.

The team is working on a few remaining pieces, other than that, the Marine Green update to Pacific Northwest Portal is just about ready! We've set the launch date for a week from tomorrow - Monday, October 24th, 2005.

As with our last major update - the launch of Version 3.0 on July 20th - this package of changes is based largely on your feedback and suggestions.

The official version number for the Marine Green Update is 3.5. Here's a timeline of Pacific Northwest Portal's version history:

1. January 10th-28th, 2005: Pacific Northwest Portal is conceptualized and developed. By the 28th, a beta version is live on the web for testing.
2. January 31st, 2005: Pacific Northwest Portal Version 1.0 is officially launched, and traffic takes off. Version 1.0 includes just three pages.
3. February 7th, 2005: Pacific NW Portal launches Version 1.1, debuting the Expanded Washington section and syndicating 6 additional blogs from the Evergreen State.
4. February 10th, 2005: A minor package of changes [Version 1.5] is released - with the largest being a font change on the RSS feeds, which is changed to Trebuchet MS from Garamond. Version 1.5 also includes new CSS code to stabilize the display in different browsers. Support for Firefox is improved.
5. February 14th, 2005: Pacific NW Portal debuts Version 3.7, debuting an Expanded Oregon section and syndicating 6 additional blogs from the Beaver State.
6. February 28th, 2005: A revamped site is launched [Version 2.0], with big changes to the homepage, two new sections, and a new Blogs & Websites directory with site icons for every blog.
7. March 21st, 2005: Version 2.1 released. Pacific NW Portal rolls out improved newswires with better filtering to screen out conservative and unwanted mainstream news sources.
8. March 29th, 2005: Version 2.2 released. Blog syndication changes are announced and the directory is updated.
9. April 25th, 2005: Version 2.3 released. The directory is once again updated and the new Highlights section is unveiled.
10. May 10th, 2005: Version 2.5 released. The new Toolkit section is introduced and most pages are given important updates.
11. July 20th, 2005: "True Blue", Pacific NW Portal Version 3.0, is launched. It includes new pages, new syndicated blogs, new features, and a redesign, along with a major directory update. Interface, reliability, and feed engine are improved by leaps and bounds.
12. August 4th, 2005: The Early August Update [Version 3.1] to Pacific Northwest Portal is released. It includes new graphics, better newswires, new syndicated blogs, a revamped Toolkit page (with better traffic and weather), another directory update, and minor changes to a few other pages.
13. August 30th, 2005: Pacific Northwest Portal Version 3.2 launches, billed as the "Late August Update". It includes the debut of a new syndicate member, another directory update, and another set of new graphics.

If you read the timeline carefully, you noticed that we skip around a bit. For example, our last update was Version 3.2, but this one is Version 3.5.

The reason is that some updates are more significant than others. Rather than release what's in the Marine Green Update in increments, we prefer to thoroughly comb through the site making sure we're satisfied with the major changes and also fixing other bugs.

So the nonexistent Versions 3.3 and 3.4, for example, could exist - but they're just accumulated right into Version 3.5. Not that you really care that much anyway!

Be sure to check back here for the details on next Monday's launch of Version 3.5 - the "Marine Green" Update.