Overview of the Improvements in Newport (Pacific NW Portal Version 5.0)

After many years of devel­op­ment, Pacif­ic NW Por­tal Ver­sion 5.0 (New­port) is final­ly ready for your brows­ing plea­sure. The fol­low­ing post con­sti­tutes our offi­cial changel­og for Ver­sion 5.0; it describes the changes we made to the Por­tal and our rea­sons for doing so. Please feel free to leave ques­tions, sug­ges­tions for future ver­sions, or oth­er thoughts on New­port in the com­ment thread.

Thanks and enjoy!

Overall Site Improvements

• Speed­i­er load­ing. New­port is eas­i­ly the fastest ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal ever. The site has been re-engi­neered from the ground up for quick­er ini­tial load­ing and faster refresh­es. We no longer use JavaScript to dis­play feeds (or any con­tent, for that mat­ter). Our serv­er does the heavy lift­ing of pro­cess­ing and ren­der­ing feeds, instead of your brows­er. Users of old­er browsers and plat­forms, in par­tic­u­lar, should see an improve­ment in page load­ing times.
• Bet­ter acces­si­bil­i­ty; min­i­mal use of JavaScript. As men­tioned, the amount of JavaScript used on Pacif­ic NW Por­tal has been vast­ly reduced. We’ve tak­en a pro­gres­sive enhance­ment approach as far as JavaScript goes: hav­ing it enabled adds a lit­tle extra mag­ic, but it isn’t required to make things work. This allows users who choose to have JavaScript dis­abled to still make near­ly com­plete use of the Por­tal. It also allows users on old­er devices that do not sup­port JavaScript to begin with to use the Portal.
• Reli­a­bil­i­ty improved…again. Pacif­ic NW Portal’s new Cache Ser­vice keeps a copy of all feeds crawled by our aggre­ga­tor until the next suc­cess­ful crawl, instead of read­ing feeds on the fly. The Cache Ser­vice vir­tu­al­ly elim­i­nates lag and helps ensure reli­able page loads, so you don’t see error mes­sages or emp­ty space where feeds should be.
• Opti­mized for wider screens. The Por­tal’s dimen­sions onscreen have changed. The site is now designed for screens with a res­o­lu­tion of at least 1024 by 768 pix­els. Pret­ty much every flat screen mon­i­tor out there has a native res­o­lu­tion of 1024 by 768 or high­er (this is also true of tablet screens!) Those still using CRT mon­i­tors have the abil­i­ty to boost their res­o­lu­tion to 1024 by 768 with­out any image degra­da­tion, so nobody should be see­ing hor­i­zon­tal scroll­bars as a result of this change.
• Edgy facelift. A beau­ti­ful new set of graph­ics for page titles and head­ings have been rolled out, fea­tur­ing imagery from across the Pacif­ic North­west (most of it from NPI’s pho­to library). The last traces of Gara­mond are gone; Book Anti­qua and Tre­buchet MS are now the only fonts in use.
• Intel­li­gent trou­bleshoot­ing. If for some rea­son a feed won’t load, Pacif­ic NW Por­tal will dis­play a friend­ly error mes­sage explain­ing that there was a prob­lem and sug­gest trou­bleshoot­ing steps.
• Eas­i­er feed read­ing. Indi­vid­ual items are now gen­er­al­ly dis­played site-wide as lists, with bul­lets denot­ing each item. Hyper­links are also often empha­sized in bold­face. We hope this makes brows­ing the Por­tal easier.
• Valid HTML5. All of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s pages now use the HTML5 doc­type and val­i­date as HTML5 — which means the Por­tal should ren­der smooth­ly in any mod­ern, stan­dards-com­pli­ant web browser.

Front Page

• New design. The front page has under­gone a major redesign. It’s more  col­or­ful than it used to be, while man­ag­ing to be clean­er at the same time. Bor­ders, on-focus high­light­ing, and gra­di­ents have been added to help orga­nize the con­tent and make it more readable.
• Wel­come carousel. At the top of the front page, under the nav­i­ga­tion, is a new slid­er, or carousel, which explains what Pacif­ic NW Por­tal is and offers tips on how to use the site. One of the slides con­tains a mini-video which demon­strates how to make use of the new What’s this? tooltips.
• Stronger empha­sis on NPI’s work. Three new sec­tions under­neath the name­plate and wel­come carousel allow read­ers to keep up with all of NPI’s projects and pub­li­ca­tions. In Depth offers the lat­est com­men­tary and analy­sis from The Advo­cate, In Focus presents announce­ments and updates from NPI projects like Per­ma­nent Defense, and In Brief con­tains news and links curat­ed by NPI’s staff, board, and contributors.
• Sto­ries orga­nized by scope. The front page now presents news orga­nized by lev­el — Fed­er­al, State, and Local. Each lev­el has its own col­umn. The Fed­er­al col­umn pri­mar­i­ly fea­tures sto­ries about nation­al pol­i­tics, the State col­umn pri­mar­i­ly fea­tures sto­ries about region­al pol­i­tics, and the Local col­umn has sto­ries about city, coun­ty, and com­mu­ni­ty pol­i­tics. Indexed sources include news­pa­pers, blogs, tele­vi­sion net­works, and radio sta­tions com­mit­ted to tra­di­tion­al jour­nal­ism or pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy journalism.
• Con­text is just a click away. The front page is admit­ted­ly pret­ty packed with feeds, and can feel to over­whelm­ing to a new user. So we’ve added some real­ly nifty What’s this? tooltips to pro­vide a descrip­tion for each feed. Sim­ply click on the head­ing for any feed on the front page, and a tooltip will pop up with an expla­na­tion of what that feed is. Note that this is an advanced fea­ture and requires JavaScript to be enabled to work.
• Say hel­lo to Cam­paign Buzz, Occu­py Radar and the PNW Top­ic Hotlist. At the bot­tom of the front page are three new columns. One tracks the lat­est posts from Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paign blogs. The sec­ond com­piles updates from the Occu­py move­ment in all major Pacif­ic North­west cities. And the third shows blog entries sort­ed by note­wor­thy cur­rent events, as curat­ed by the PNW Top­ic Hotlist.

New pages

• Intro­duc­ing Break­ing Now. The High­lights and Region­al Wire pages have been com­plete­ly replaced by Break­ing Now, which takes over the job of pro­vid­ing unfil­tered updates from the Por­tal’s broad array of sources in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order. Break­ing Now is divid­ed into two cat­e­gories, Break­ing Local­ly and Break­ing Nation­al­ly. Each cat­e­go­ry is fur­ther sub­di­vid­ed into two feeds: one com­pris­ing pro­gres­sive media out­lets and one com­pris­ing con­ven­tion­al media out­lets. These feeds col­lec­tive­ly show the lat­est eighty posts from all of the sources that we index.
• Say hel­lo to NW Life. NW Life replaces what used to be called the Toolk­it. It tracks busi­ness, local non­prof­it, and labor head­lines, weath­er reports, and traf­fic con­di­tions. All weath­er data, includ­ing the fore­casts and radar imagery, are now pro­vid­ed direct­ly by the Nation­al Weath­er Ser­vice instead of a for-prof­it inter­me­di­ary like AccuWeather.
• A real Toolk­it for users in need of assis­tance. Although NW Life has replaced what used to be called the Toolk­it, the Por­tal now has a prop­er Toolk­it, which exists to help users trou­bleshoot any prob­lems they may be expe­ri­enc­ing with the Por­tal. The Toolk­it also con­tains book­mark­ing util­i­ties and an expla­na­tion of tech­ni­cal terms.

Regional Blogs Directory

• Blogs now orga­nized by city. Blogs list­ed in Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s Region­al Blogs Direc­to­ry are now orga­nized by city of pub­li­ca­tion, with cities list­ed in alpha­bet­i­cal order. Seat­tle, Port­land, and Boise nat­u­ral­ly have more blogs com­pared to oth­er cities in their respec­tive states, because they are the region’s biggest pop­u­la­tion centers.
• Major direc­to­ry update. Since the direc­to­ry was last checked for accu­ra­cy from top to bot­tom, many local pro­gres­sive blogs have sad­ly gone dor­mant or dis­ap­peared alto­geth­er. We have removed the dead blogs so that only active ones are list­ed, and added all of the new ones sub­mit­ted to us. In 2012, we hope to launch an online archive of the delet­ed blogs so that their authors’ works can remain acces­si­ble and available.

State pages

• Ida­ho final­ly has its own page! Ida­hoans, rejoice. We now have three state pages… includ­ing one for the Gem State. The Ida­ho Digest, which has been a planned addi­tion for a very long time, has joined the Wash­ing­ton Out­look and Ore­gon Bul­letin, with all the same features.
• Syn­di­cat­ed blogs moved to state pages. All syn­di­cat­ed blogs may now be found on our state pages. Eight pro­gres­sive blogs are now syn­di­cat­ed for each state, for a total of twen­ty-four. New posts from syn­di­cat­ed blogs also appear in chrono­log­i­cal order with posts from oth­er pro­gres­sive and tra­di­tion­al media sources on Break­ing Now and the front page.
• Expand­ed newswires. Next to the syn­di­cat­ed blogs on each state page is the Newswire for that state, which presents the lat­est sto­ries about state-lev­el pol­i­tics pub­lished by tra­di­tion­al media sources, includ­ing news­pa­pers, radio sta­tions, and tele­vi­sion net­works. Sophis­ti­cat­ed fil­ters ensure that the Newswires only con­tain polit­i­cal stories.
• More and bet­ter local news­feeds. State pages now have a total of sev­en local news­feeds each. The ten most recent sto­ries indexed are shown for each state’s largest city (Seat­tle, Port­land, Boise) while four sto­ries are shown for the oth­er cities. Sto­ries from all twen­ty-one cities also appear on the front page under the Local column.

Recommended browsers

Pacif­ic NW Por­tal is best expe­ri­enced using a mod­ern brows­er. We have thor­ough­ly test­ed the new Por­tal in all of the lat­est ver­sions of the lead­ing major browsers:

• Fire­fox 9 (Fire­fox is, in our opin­ion, still the best brows­er out there, despite strong com­pe­ti­tion. We high­ly rec­om­mend both the desk­top ver­sion for Win­dows, Mac, and GNU/Linux, as well as Fire­fox Mobile for Android).
• Inter­net Explor­er 9 (The Por­tal also works in Inter­net Explor­er 8, but unfor­tu­nate­ly IE 8 is miss­ing sup­port for some of the site’s more advanced fea­tures. Those will degrade grace­ful­ly if you’re using IE 8).
• Chromi­um 18 (Note that we rec­om­mend against using Google Chrome for pri­va­cy rea­sons. Chrome = Chromi­um + pro­pri­etary Google soft­ware designed to track user behav­ior. To enjoy Chrome with­out being spied on, use a non-Google build of Chromi­um like Chrome­Plus).
• Opera 11.60 (Desk­top only, please note that Pacif­ic NW Por­tal 5 looks very bro­ken in Opera Mini. We advise stick­ing to your native brows­er if you are an iPhone, Win­dows Phone 7+, or Black­Ber­ry OS 6.0+ user. If you are an Android user, we rec­om­mend Fire­fox for Mobile).
• Safari 5 (Note that some fea­tures do not work opti­mal­ly in Safari; how­ev­er, there are no show­stop­ping bugs you need to wor­ry about).

Although we did min­i­mal­ly test New­port for com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with Inter­net Explor­er 6 and 7, we can­not guar­an­tee that any of New­port’s advanced fea­tures will work. If you’re fond of Inter­net Explor­er, please upgrade to IE 8, or ide­al­ly, IE 9 (unfor­tu­nate­ly IE 9 is only avail­able to users of Win­dows Vista or Win­dows 7).

Alter­na­tive­ly, switch to Fire­fox. The lat­est ver­sion of Fire­fox works on Win­dows XP. (Amaz­ing­ly, it also works on Win­dows 2000, which is more than a decade old).

In addi­tion to test­ing New­port on all the major desk­top browsers and smart­phone plat­forms, we also test­ed it exten­sive­ly on tablets, includ­ing Apple’s iPad, RIM’s Black­Ber­ry Play­Book, and Ama­zon’s Kin­dle Fire.

Newport was built on your ideas

Many of the new fea­tures or changes we’re unveil­ing today were sug­gest­ed by read­ers like you who have loy­al­ly sup­port­ed Pacif­ic NW Por­tal for many years. For exam­ple, the Cache Ser­vice was pro­posed by our good friend Kari Chisholm, the idea to cre­ate NW Life came from Rowan Wolf, and the improved nav­i­ga­tion bar (which is con­sis­tent on every page) was sug­gest­ed by Daniel Kirkdorffer.

If you have an idea for the next incar­na­tion of the Por­tal, please share it with us. Chances are pret­ty good that it could be included!