Nominate: Portagame.com

We'd like to nominate Portagame.com for a much needed reboot, refresh, and do-over.

Why Portagame?

We make great first impressions. We've pulled into the Sonic burger Drive-in in our classic Z with Styx thumping our 12-inch speakers. We're wearing Nike Shox and white socks, Guess jeans hiked up with a leather braided belt and our faded Thinkgeek "I'm blogging this." shirt tucked-in. We have on our Oakley's, our bluetooth headset, and our Sprint motorola i90 attached to our belt in its nifty holder. We keep a fanny pack in the trunk, just in case. We have our first generation iPod shuffle hard wired (with exposed electrical tape) into the kickin' OEM stereo system of our hot ride. We watch re-runs Walker: Texas Ranger and American Gladiators so we know how to be a bad ass! We're training to talk like a Ninja and be stealthy like a Pirate.

You see, Portagame is very much going through a mid-life crisis. We just want to be cool again. PG started back when Gizmodo and Engadget were still reporting gaming news (before they spawned Kotaku and Joystiq respectively). Gmail invites were a hot commodity (want some? we have more!) and the PSP and DS were still rumors. We were poised to strike early and we had a great ride through 2004 and early 2005.

So what happened? We can't blame our abrupt decline on a single event. It was a combination of a few things: life changes, new demanding day jobs, editors leaving, cross-country moves, new ownership, etc. But probably the biggest disappointment we faced was that the platform we selected in its infancy to power our blog didn't evolve into what we were hoping. While we were stuck using the B2evolution platform, which did a good job for our needs at the time, the worlds of Drupal and Wordpress were evolving at break-neck speeds. For every one plugin that the B2evo community released, Drupal and WP released a dozen or more. Wordpress would get a hundred new themes in any given week, while B2E users tried to work up excitement for the one theme they got every other week.

Don't get us wrong, we loved B2evo, we really did. It just fell very short of our expectations. Whether the blame for having such high expectations falls on the heads of the community organizers or on ourselves is unknown, we should have realized it was time to jump ship a long, long time ago.

We're shopping for a new platform. Currently we are looking at a Wordpress / vBulletin one, two combo. Or we may just use a blog mod for vBulletin. Our goal is to create a community where reviews by anyone are welcome, and the review system we selected for reviews is a vBulletin plugin. We'd like our first page to be stories in blog form, with a familiar forum welcoming users on the inside.

Is a Portagame reboot too much for the Performancing pros to handle? We certainly hope not.