Last month, when we unveiled Pacif­ic NW Por­tal Ver­sion 5.0 (code­named New­port), we also com­mit­ted to adopt­ing a more fre­quent release cycle for the project, deliv­er­ing improve­ments on a more incre­men­tal basis, like we did dur­ing Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s ear­ly days sev­en years ago.

I am pleased today to announce that the first fruits of our new approach have borne fruit. Today, just one month after New­port went live, we are releas­ing its suc­ces­sor: Ver­sion 5.1, code­named Agate Beach.

Agate Beach is what’s known as a main­te­nance release. As the ver­sion num­ber indi­cates, it is sim­ply a more pol­ished incar­na­tion of the last major release (New­port). It’s sort of the inverse of an overhaul.

Agate Beach is an unin­cor­po­rat­ed com­mu­ni­ty in Lin­coln Coun­ty near New­port, Ore­gon. It is named for the agates (a vari­ety of sil­i­ca) found on the shores there. It is acces­si­ble to the pub­lic as a state recre­ation­al site.

Agate Beach, Ore­gon (Pho­to by Mike Krzeszak, used under a Cre­ative Com­mons license)

The fol­low­ing post con­sti­tutes our offi­cial changel­og for Ver­sion 5.1. Please feel free to leave ques­tions, sug­ges­tions for future ver­sions, or oth­er thoughts on Agate Beach in the com­ment thread.

Overall Site Enhancements

• Full titles for arti­cles and posts now appear on mouseover. Many of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s feeds trun­cate titles to save space (and always have). This allows items to be neat­ly pre­sent­ed. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this often means some words get cut off. We have repro­grammed our feeds with trun­cat­ed titles so that read­ers have the abil­i­ty to mouse over a link and see the full title in a tooltip. This way, it’s pos­si­ble to pre­view the full title before click­ing the link.
• Feed titles and descrip­tions now trun­cate with prop­er ellipses. In the past, cut-off descrip­tions and titles end­ed in two dots (..) to sig­ni­fy the omis­sion of the rest of the descrip­tion or title. How­ev­er, a prop­er ellip­sis has three ellip­sis points (…), as defined by the Chica­go Man­u­al of Style and NPI’s own Style Guide (in draft). We have recon­fig­ured Pacif­ic NW Por­tal so that it trun­cates all cut-off items with prop­er ellipses.
• Fed­er­al, State, and Local columns now line up more con­sis­tent­ly. We’ve elim­i­nat­ed some align­ment prob­lems by mak­ing a cou­ple of adjust­ments to Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s stylesheet. Items appear­ing under one of these three front page columns are no longer per­mit­ted to spill over and take up more than their allot­ted space.
• Vis­it­ed links now tracked. Pacif­ic NW Por­tal now dis­plays clicked links in pur­ple (which is the uni­ver­sal default most browsers adhere to) instead of the same blue used for unvis­it­ed links. This should make it eas­i­er to dis­tin­guish between already-read and not yet-read posts.
• Bugs and blem­ish­es fixed. We’ve resolved a few minor prob­lems relat­ing to user expe­ri­ence and lay­out. Some were brows­er-spe­cif­ic. For instance, in Mozil­la Fire­fox, an annoy­ing gray rec­tan­gle was appear­ing when­ev­er the Pre­vi­ous or Next but­tons were clicked. We’ve made that go away. And on the Black­Ber­ry Play­Book, one of the carousel slides was appear­ing at the edges of adja­cent slides. Not anymore.

Regional Blogs Directory Update

Here is a list of the blogs we have added to Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s Region­al Blogs Direc­to­ry since New­port (Ver­sion 5.0) went live.

All of these blogs were added to the Wash­ing­ton column.

• Of Para­mount Impor­tance (Shore­line)
• Health­Watched (Seat­tle)
• Read the Dirt (Belling­ham)
• The Spo­van­ge­list (Spokane)

Our thanks to all who con­tin­ue to sup­port Pacif­ic NW Por­tal. Enjoy the new version!