Toolkit at Pacific NW Portal :: Help and Troubleshooting Tips

Loaded at 3:04 PM Pacific on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

If, for some unfortunate reason, Pacific NW Portal and/or the NPI network go down, we will do our very best to get things up and running as fast as possible. The best way to check up on the status of the network is to follow NPI on Twitter. To report an outage, call 1-866-345-1895 and leave a voice message by pressing star, or send an email to emergency (at) npi (dot) cc. Please do not attempt to report an outage unless you have verified you can connect to other websites but not ours.

Solutions to problems that may prevent Pacific NW Portal from appearing correctly in your browser

We welcome your screenshots
The best way for us to help you troubleshoot problems you're having with the Portal is for you to show us what you're seeing. You can do this by taking a screenshot - a picture of your screen - and sending that to us. You can also look at these screenshots, taken from our computers, to see what Pacific NW Portal should look like on your operating system:

Microsoft Windows | Apple Mac | GNU/Linux

Problem: Text on Pacific NW Portal overlaps or stacks (appearing on top of other text or graphics) making it difficult to read

Potential Solutions

Linux users should check to see whether Trebuchet MS is installed. Major distributions like Ubuntu have the Microsoft Core fonts for the Web available in their repositories. For Ubuntu, just pull up Terminal and run: $sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Trebuchet MS should then install and be available to your browser.
Verify that your browser is displaying fonts in Normal size.
- In Mozilla Firefox (all operating systems) , hit Ctrl+0 on your keyboard, or go to View > Zoom > Reset.
- In Apple's Safari (Mac and Windows), click View and then click Text size. Two new buttons will appear next to the refresh button, a small A and a larger A. Choose the small A to reduce font size.
- In Internet Explorer (Windows), click Page, then mouse over Zoom, and click 100%
Verify that your browser is not set to ignore Pacific NW Portal's stylesheets. In Mozilla Firefox, click on Tools and then Options. Choose "General" and then "Fonts & Colors". Check to see if the "Always use my..." boxes are checked. If so, click to uncheck them.

Problem: Feeds don't load on Pacific NW Portal, and/or an error message appears advising you to consult the Toolkit.

Potential Solutions

Try refreshing the page to see if the feeds will load.
Contact us and let us know about the problem. We'll look into it.

Problem: A horizontal scrollbar appears at the bottom of Pacific NW Portal, forcing you to scroll sideways to view content.

Solution: This scrollbar appears because your screen's resolution is set below 1024x768 - the standard resolution. If you use a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor, you should be able to increase your resolution without any distortion or degradation. (Almost all flat panel LCD screens, by contrast, are natively set to a specific screen resolution, at least 1024x768 or higher).

Problem: Pacific NW Portal is loading slowly.

Potential Solutions

Try visiting other websites (i.e. Daily Kos, ThinkProgress) and see if they load at the usual pace in your browser. If not, there's probably an issue with your Internet connection. Call your Internet Service Provider.
Run a speed test to see if your connection is slower than usual.
Run traceroute to check the path from your home router or modem to our servers. To do this:
- On Microsoft Windows (all versions) , click the Start menu, then click Run. Type cmd in the box and hit Enter. A black window will appear. Type tracert www.nwprogressive.org. Windows should respond by saying Tracing route... and showing you a list of routers and times between each, in milliseconds. Once the list is complete, right click and select Mark. Drag your cursor over the results so that the whole list is selected. Right click again. You've just copied the results of the traceroute. Paste this into our Contact form and send it to us.
- On Linux, Apple's Mac, and other Unix-like systems, go to the command line (i.e. Gnome's Terminal or KDE's Konsole) and type the command tracreoute www.nwprogressive.org. Copy the output and send it to us via our Contact form.
If you think the problem is on our end, let us know and we'll look into it.

A start page is the first page you see when your browser (say, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple’s Safari) loads. It’s also known as your own home page. If you press the “home” button in your browser, that’s the page you’ll go to. It's easy to make Pacific NW Portal your start page.

Click this link to open the prompt to change your start page to the Portal. Select "Yes" or "Use this webpage..."

Click once only and then drag this link onto your Home button to make the Portal your start page. Click Yes.

Other Browsers: In Safari, go to Preferences > General and look for the Home Page Field; in Opera, on the main menu bar click on Navigation and select Set Home. In Konqueror (part of the K Desktop Environment), go to the Window menu and click on Save View Profile Web Browsing. The URL to add is always http://www.nwprogressive.org/portal

A bookmark, or favorite, is a web page location that is stored for later retrieval by a web browser. Their primary purpose is to easily catalog and access web pages that a user has visited or will visit, by name rather than by address. Use this link to bookmark Pacific NW Portal in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and other major browsers.

Note: If you are using Chrome/Chromium, the link above won't work... you'll need to manually create the bookmark yourself.

Add Pacific NW Portal to your social bookmarks...
del.icio.us | Furl | Simpy | StumbleUpon | Yahoo

Pacific NW Portal has detected the following about your computer:

Operating System:

Browser: You are running unknown unknown

JavaScript: Disabled. Running NoScript? Allow nwprogressive.org for an optimal user experience

Cookies: JavaScript is not enabled, so this test cannot run...

Screen Resolution: JavaScript is not enabled, so this test cannot run...

Please submit the above to us with your screenshot if you are contacting NPI about a problem you're having viewing Pacific NW Portal.

What do the terms in the above test results mean?

Operating System: The basic software that manages computer hardware. The most common operating system families are Microsoft's Windows (which has over ninety five percent of the desktop market), GNU/Linux, and Apple's Mac. Pacific NW Portal should display properly for users of each of these operating systems.
Browser: A program for browsing the World Wide Web, the global network of interlinked documents and multimedia files that is accessible through the Internet. The most common browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer (which only runs on Windows), Mozilla Firefox (which runs on all major operating systems) and Apple's Safari (which runs on Mac and Windows). There are many others. Pacific NW Portal is tested for compatability with all major browsers.
JavaScript: A programming language that powers much of the rich interactivity on the World Wide Web... as well as all those annyoing pop-ups and most advertising too. Previous versions of Pacific NW Portal required JavaScript to be enabled for the site to work properly; however, since the launch of Version 4.5 (Newport) this is no longer the case. Pacific NW Portal will still work if JavaScript is turned off, although a very small number of features will not function.
Cookies: Small text files placed on users' computers by websites so the user can be remembered by the website. As with JavaScript, no cookies are needed to browse Pacific NW Portal. However, cookies are used to remember information typed into our Feedback form. Enabling cookies for nwprogressive.org will ensure form data doesn't get lost if there is a problem with a form submission.
Screen Resolution: Refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. (A pixel is the smallest amount of information in an image). The standard screen resolution is 1024x768 pixels. Pacific NW Portal is designed for this screen resolution. Users with lower screen resolutions (800x600, 640x800) will see a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of their screen because the Portal will be too wide for those resolutions. The only way to get rid of the scrollbar is to upgrade to a higher screen resolution - at least 1024x768. See the Knowledge Base to the left for more information.

Pacific NW Portal is owned and powered by the Northwest Progressive Institute, a netroots powered strategy center working to raise America's quality of life through innovative research and imaginative advocacy.