Sev­en years to the day after Pacif­ic NW Por­tal 3.5 (“Gearhart”, also known as “Marine Green”) was released, we’re proud to announce that we have com­plet­ed work on a new ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal: Ver­sion 5.3, code­named Depoe Bay.

Depoe Bay is a main­te­nance release — the third in the New­port series. In oth­er words, there aren’t any new major fea­tures… just bug fix­es, updates to the index, and tweaks to func­tion­al­i­ty and brand­ing to make things work better.

Like every pri­or release, Ver­sion 5.3 is named after an Ore­gon coastal town. Depoe Bay is locat­ed in Lin­coln Coun­ty (between New­port and Lin­coln City) and is home to almost 1,500 peo­ple. It claims to have “the world’s small­est har­bor”. It is one of only sev­en incor­po­rat­ed cities in Lin­coln County.

The Inn at Arch Rock in Depoe Bay, Ore­gon. (Pho­to: Tony Cyphert. Repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license).

This post con­sti­tutes our offi­cial changel­og for Ver­sion 5.3. Please feel free to leave ques­tions, sug­ges­tions for future ver­sions, or oth­er thoughts on Depoe Bay in the com­ment thread.

• New slo­gan. Since it launched in 2005, Pacif­ic NW Por­tal has gen­er­al­ly used two slo­gans (News & Infor­ma­tion for Pro­gres­sives, Polit­i­cal News From Around the Region). As of this release, Pacif­ic NW Por­tal has a new slo­gan: Cas­ca­di­a’s news hub. It replaces both of the old ones. The new slo­gan appears on Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s name­plate and in page titles.
• Updat­ed name­plate. The name­plate has been restyled to reflect the new slo­gan, and the height of the name­plate has been increased slight­ly to cre­ate more “blue space” at the top of each page. (As a con­se­quence, there is slight­ly more space around the nav­i­ga­tion bar). The name­plate now depicts Mount Hood, Ore­gon’s high­est point and the moun­tain clos­est to the Colum­bia Riv­er Gorge, which divides Ore­gon and Washington.
• Feeds updat­ed to include more North­west writ­ers who write for pub­li­ca­tions with a nation­al scope. We’ve updat­ed sev­er­al of our feeds to ensure that the works of more writ­ers based in the Pacif­ic North­west show up on the front page,NW Life (busi­ness news) and Break­ing Now. We added or updat­ed indi­vid­ual streams for the fol­low­ing authors: 
  • Kirk John­son of The New York Times
  • David Horsey of the Los Ange­les Times
  • Kim Mur­phy of the Los Ange­les Times
  • Bill Rig­by of Reuters
  • David Nei­w­ert of Crooks and Liars
  • Sara Robin­son of AlterNet
  • Joan McCarter of Dai­ly Kos (Joan’s posts were already indexed by our Dai­ly Kos feed, but they now appear on Break­ing Now as well)
• Source feeds fixed. Sev­er­al bro­ken source feeds, like the Seat­tle Times’ Pol­i­tics North­west chan­nel, have been removed and replaced so that the links are no longer bro­ken. (Pub­li­ca­tions occa­sion­al­ly repub­lish their feeds at a new loca­tion and don’t redi­rect the old feeds. We do our best to keep the source feeds as cur­rent as possible).
• Enhanced greet­ing for the morn­ing hours. Pacif­ic NW Por­tal now dis­plays a pho­to of sun­rise at Sun­rise, Mount Rainier dur­ing the morn­ing hours (Pacif­ic Time) accom­pa­nied by the greet­ing “Good morn­ing”.  The image is from NPI’s pho­to library and was tak­en last July.

Our thanks to every­one who con­tin­ues to sup­port Pacif­ic NW Por­tal. Enjoy the new version!