The big day has arrived!

Moments ago, we retired the old Pacif­ic NW Por­tal, which has been online in its cur­rent incar­na­tion for over half a decade, and replaced it with Ver­sion 5.0, code­named New­port. (Pacif­ic NW Por­tal releas­es are named after cities and towns on the Ore­gon coast. The last major release was Sea­side).

The Yaquina Bay Bridge is New­port’s most rec­og­niz­able land­mark. It first opened in Sep­tem­ber 1936 and cost more than $1 mil­lion ($16+ mil­lion in today’s dol­lars) to build. It con­sists of steel arch­es and rein­forced con­crete. (Pho­to by Trout, repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license).

New­port is ded­i­cat­ed to the mem­o­ry of found­ing NPI board mem­ber Lynn Allen, who was a great men­tor and kind friend to me and the rest of our staff for many years. We lost Lynn to can­cer almost exact­ly ten months ago and miss her still.

I actu­al­ly first became acquaint­ed with Lynn a few days after Pacif­ic NW Por­tal ini­tial­ly launched on Jan­u­ary 31st, 2005. From the begin­ning, she was incred­i­bly sup­port­ive of the project, and it became one of her favorite things.

Found­ing NPI board mem­ber Lynn Allen (Pho­to: Lin­coln Potter)

On Feb­ru­ary 5th, 2005, only a few days after Pacif­ic NW Por­tal was first unveiled, Lynn sent a short note to NPI’s staff offer­ing her con­grat­u­la­tions. “Even a few days lat­er, the buzz around your site has been tremen­dous and right­ly so,” she wrote. “What a great idea to fur­ther the knit­ting togeth­er of pro­gres­sives from the entire region.”

A few months lat­er, at Dai­ly Kos, she expound­ed on those sentiments.

There’s some­thing won­der­ful hap­pen­ing in the Pacif­ic North­west and par­tic­u­lar­ly in “blue” Wash­ing­ton State.

Because we have a Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nor and a (just bare­ly) Demo­c­ra­t­ic Leg­is­la­ture, we are able to show the coun­try what good gov­ern­ment real­ly means. We have strong activist envi­ron­men­tal and wom­en’s and social jus­tice groups. We have a robust pro­gres­sive grass­roots. We have a his­to­ry of being prac­ti­cal and real.

Now, just this year, we are grow­ing a strong lib­er­al blo­gos­phere that is help­ing tie all this togeth­er across three states and Pacif­ic NW Por­tal is key to this. Just as Dai­ly Kos and Talk­ing­PointsMemo and oth­ers nation­al sites have become a nation­al spokescen­ter for the lib­er­al blo­gos­phere, so too is Pacif­ic NW Por­tal doing that for our region. It is a very impor­tant cen­tral infor­ma­tion clear­ing­house and allows the rest of the pro­gres­sive blogs to have an echo cham­ber that ampli­fies what we are able to report and focus­es the grass­roots on the crit­i­cal issues of the day, the week, the year.

As a pro­gres­sive region, we are becom­ing a mod­el for the rest of the coun­try and Pacif­ic NW Por­tal can become a mod­el for oth­er region­al blo­gos­pheres as well.

Pacif­ic NW Por­tal is now near­ly sev­en years old (its birth­day is only a month and a week away). It has aged great­ly since its last major release — Ver­sion 4.0, or “Sea­side”, in May of 2006 — despite receiv­ing minor updates in the inter­ven­ing years. And that’s because the Web is a fast-chang­ing medi­um. Five years might as well be five decades… the Inter­net seems to have its own time.

But as of tonight, Sea­side is his­to­ry. It has been super­seded at last.

I want to stress that we did not devel­op its suc­ces­sor (New­port) in a vac­u­um. Pacif­ic NW Por­tal 5 is a site built for the 2012 web, not the 2007 web. It uses the HTML5 doc­type, WebM video for­mat, and, in many places, takes advan­tage of CSS3… while still man­ag­ing to be back­wards-com­pat­i­ble enough so it does­n’t look like a mess in old­er browsers. It was also test­ed on smart­phones and tablets in addi­tion to desk­top oper­at­ing systems.

In 2012, we will be fol­low­ing Mozil­la’s exam­ple and adopt­ing a rapid release cycle for Pacif­ic NW Por­tal. While we don’t plan to raise the ver­sion num­ber by an entire inte­ger every six weeks (we don’t see that as nec­es­sary), we do plan to release updates and improve­ments incre­men­tal­ly, just as Mozil­la now does with Fire­fox. So you can rest assured that more updates will be forth­com­ing on a reg­u­lar basis. Think of New­port as a begin­ning, not an end.

We cor­dial­ly invite you to explore the all-new Pacif­ic NW Por­tal 5 and share with us your com­ments, ques­tions, and sug­ges­tions.

Mer­ry Christ­mas and Hap­py Hanukkah!