NPI's Cascadia Advocate

Offering commentary and analysis from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's uplifting perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Monday, September 23rd, 2013

Pacific NW Portal 5.6 (Otter Rock) released

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.

Otter Rock, Oregon

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: 
  • 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: 

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.

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