On behalf of the NPI team, I’m pleased to announce that we have com­plet­ed work  on a new release of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal – Ver­sion 5.6, code­named Otter Rock.

Otter Rock is a main­te­nance release – the sixth 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 5.6 is named after an Ore­gon coastal town or com­mu­ni­ty. Otter Rock is locat­ed in Lin­coln Coun­ty only a few miles of north of New­port. It is the small­est Ore­gon com­mu­ni­ty to have its own Mo’s Seafood, and also home to the Dev­ils Punch­bowl State Nat­ur­al Area.

The Ore­gon coast at Otter Rock, just north of New­port. (Pho­to by GC Menezes, repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license)

This post con­sti­tutes our offi­cial changel­og for Ver­sion 5.6. Please feel free to leave ques­tions, sug­ges­tions for future ver­sions, or oth­er thoughts on Otter Rock in the com­ment thread.

• New syn­di­cat­ed blogs for the Wash­ing­ton Out­look. Our Wash­ing­ton State page has four new syn­di­cat­ed blogs, replac­ing sev­er­al blogs that had gone dor­mant. Our new­ly syn­di­cat­ed blogs are: 
  • Schmud­get
  • Sight­line Daily
  • Sound Progress
• Feeds for many Wash­ing­ton news sources rein­dexed. Sev­er­al of the Ever­green State news sources that Pacif­ic NW Por­tal has long indexed have recent­ly revamped their web­sites and moved their con­tent to new loca­tions. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, when they changed their URL scheme, they did­n’t both­er to redi­rect their old URLs. Con­se­quent­ly, we had to man­u­al­ly update a num­ber of feeds that had gone dead. We are now index­ing Cross­cut, The Belling­ham Her­ald, Q13 Fox, the Cap­i­tal Press and sev­er­al oth­er sources again.
• New art on the front page. The graph­i­cal head­er above the Fed­er­al, State, and Local columns now con­sists of pho­to art derived from pho­tographs in NPI’s image library. Depict­ed from left to right are the U.S. Capi­tol, Wash­ing­ton’s Leg­isla­tive Build­ing and the Seat­tle skyline.
• New after­noon and evening greet­ings. The after­noon and evening greet­ings now depict scenes from Ore­gon, while the morn­ing and night greet­ings depict scenes from Wash­ing­ton. The after­noon scene is a spot on the Ore­gon coast near New­port (fit­ting­ly, as Pacif­ic NW Por­tal 5 was code­named “New­port”) and the evening scene shows a beau­ti­ful sum­mer sun­set on Crater Lake, with Wiz­ard Island in the foreground.
• Dupli­cate fil­ters turned on for more feeds. Owing to the num­ber of feeds Pacif­ic NW Por­tal index­es (some of which over­lap or con­tain the same con­tent), we’d begun see­ing some dupli­cate items crop­ping up in sev­er­al feeds. We have enabled addi­tion­al dupli­cate fil­ters where appro­pri­ate to ensure news items don’t show up twice or even three times.
• New feeds added to Break­ing Now. We have added sev­er­al new sources to the Break­ing Now (Nation­wide Tra­di­tion­al) feed. They are: 
  • Al Jazeera America
  • Busi­ness­week
  • The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Eric Wem­ple Blog
  • Chica­go Tribune
  • The Den­ver Post
  • Hous­ton Chronicle

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.