Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Pacific NW Portal: Three Years!

Thirty six months ago, in the early weeks of Dino Rossi's ill fated gubernatorial election challenge, we launched a project to bring together the many blogs in the growing local netroots community: Pacific NW Portal.

Our goal then was to establish a simple, yet helpful gateway for activists, elected officials, reporters, and interested citizens.

Since the site's debut on January 31st, 2005, we have worked to steadily improve Pacific NW Portal from a slightly shaky experiment to a stable, reliable resource providing a wealth of information at visitors' fingertips.

Major milestones in the Portal's development history have included True Blue/3.0 (July 2005), Marine Green/3.5 (October 2005) and Seaside/4.0 (May 2006). Version 4 has held up remarkably well since its release, and while we're pleased with the compatability it introduced, we don't consider it a final product. As long as there is room for improvement, development will never be finished.

Today we are pleased to announce the completion of Version 4.2... the "Third Anniversary Edition". While this is only a minor update, we hope the following changes result in a greater user experience:
  • We've added a "New Blogs on the Block" feature to the front page that highlights incoming additions to our Regional Blogs Directory, which we hope will steer traffic to writers that are just starting out.
  • We've revamped the Regional Wire teaser (also on the front page) and restyled it to match the other "news wires" carrying recent headlines from the traditional media. You'll find links to ten of the latest posts from across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, and Montana there.
  • We've fixed a number of feeds that became broken due to link rot.
  • Finally, we've reset the Washington State News Wire, which (for some reason) froze and stopped showing the latest stories.
To our readers, and everyone who has visited Pacific Northwest Portal or recommended it to a friend or fellow activist, thank you. We especially appreciate those bloggers that link to the Portal or display a "Syndicated" link button. Your support is invaluable and sincerely appreciated by all of us at the Northwest Progressive Institute.

Three years is an awfully long time in the netroots era. We can only imagine where Pacific Northwest Portal will be three years from now.

We hope you'll be along for the ride.

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