Categories: AnnouncementsMeta

Pacific NW Portal 5.5 (Waldport) released

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: 
  • 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: 
  • 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.

Andrew Villeneuve

Andrew Villeneuve is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, as well as the founder of NPI's sibling, the Northwest Progressive Foundation. He has worked to advance progressive causes for over two decades as a strategist, speaker, author, and organizer. Andrew is also a cybersecurity expert, a veteran facilitator, a delegate to the Washington State Democratic Central Committee, and a member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.

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