On behalf of the NPI team, I’m pleased to announce that we have com­plet­ed work tonight on a new release of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal — Ver­sion 5.5, code­named Wald­port.

Wald­port is a main­te­nance release – the fifth 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 of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal, Ver­sion 5.5 is named after an Ore­gon coastal town. Wald­port is locat­ed in Lin­coln Coun­ty just over fif­teen miles south of New­port. The town is home to 2,033 peo­ple and is one of just sev­en incor­po­rat­ed cities in Lin­coln Coun­ty. It is sit­u­at­ed along­side of Alsea Bay.

The Alsea Bay Bridge car­ries U.S. 101 over Alsea Bay and into Wald­port, Ore­gon. (Pho­to by Koocheekoo; repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license).

This post con­sti­tutes our offi­cial changel­og for Ver­sion 5.5. Please feel free to leave ques­tions, sug­ges­tions for future ver­sions, or oth­er thoughts on Wald­port in the com­ment thread.

• Con­tent deliv­ery net­work deployed. To fur­ther increase Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s speed (the theme of the New­port series) we’ve begun deploy­ment of a con­tent deliv­ery net­work, or CDN. Our new CDN serves images and scripts to Pacif­ic NW Por­tal through a sub­do­main (media.nwportal.info) using mul­ti­ple dat­a­cen­ters. This is an under-the-hood enhance­ment and does­n’t affect the way that Pacif­ic NW Por­tal looks.
• Syn­di­ca­tion updates for the Wash­ing­ton Out­look. We have replaced two dor­mant blogs and one appar­ent­ly defunct blog on Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s Wash­ing­ton Out­look page with blogs that are being active­ly main­tained. The new syn­di­cat­ed blogs are: 
  • The Polit­i­cal Junkie
  • Wash­ing­ton Liberals
• Mis­con­fig­ured news­feed recal­i­brat­ed. One of the local news­feeds on the Wash­ing­ton Out­look page — specif­i­cal­ly, the Everett news­feed — con­tained some out­dat­ed tem­plate tags that were dis­tort­ing the appear­ance of the feed. (All of the hyper­link tags were bro­ken!) We have fixed this.
• Ore­gon Trans­porta­tion Alerts feed fixed. We have rebuilt and repro­grammed the Ore­gon Trans­porta­tion Alerts feed on the NW Life page. The feed now dis­plays alerts and project updates from ODOT like it’s sup­posed to (it had recent­ly ceased func­tion­ing). We’ve also enhanced the feed so it pulls posts from the Willamette Bridge con­struc­tion blog as well as pho­tos from ODOT’s Flickr photostream.
• Tem­per­a­ture read­er now work­ing con­sis­tent­ly. The script that retrieves the lat­est tem­per­a­ture read­ing from NWS’ weath­er sta­tion at Seat­tle-Taco­ma Inter­na­tion­al Air­port had been func­tion­ing errat­i­cal­ly because the auto­mat­ed process that runs it could­n’t locate all of its depen­den­cies. We have explic­it­ly defined all the depen­den­cies, and now the read­er works 100% of the time.
• Screen­shots are cur­rent. We’ve replaced the exam­ple screen­shots on the Toolk­it page with images that depict the cur­rent ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal — this release (5.5). The exam­ple screen­shots show how Pacif­ic NW Por­tal is sup­posed to look on dif­fer­ent platforms.
• New feeds added to the Coast to Coast Fire­hose and Break­ing Now. We have added four pro­gres­sive pub­li­ca­tions to the Coast to Coast Fire­hose (a front page feed for pro­gres­sive media) and to the Break­ing Now Pro­gres­sive Media feed (Nation­al) which is a mir­ror of the Fire­hose. They are: 
  • Naked Cap­i­tal­ism
  • Raw Sto­ry
  • FreeSpeech TV
  • In These Times
• Enhanced local news­feeds (exper­i­men­tal). We’re exper­i­ment­ing with incor­po­rat­ing press releas­es, newslet­ters, and alerts cre­at­ed by city gov­ern­ments into the local news­feeds found on our state pages. The idea is to make the local news­feeds more comprehensive.

That does it for this release. If you have thoughts on any of these changes, or ideas for future improve­ments that you’d like to see, leave a com­ment in the thread.