About altportland
Welcome to the alt.portland guide, aka the Portland [Low-Budget] Guide...
About altportland, or how a website ate my life
Our Mission
To provide information about Portland's restaurants, taverns, shops, and other services—essentially, the stuff that makes Portland special, the things worth seeking out.
The guiding philosophy is to create the best Portland guide in the world, to point to other great resources, and to empower readers to find the quirky and delightful Portland that they seek.
Our Organization
Alt.portland is not an organization. Alt.portland is not for-profit or non-profit. It does not have members or advertisers. It strives for honesty, not nepotism.
Our History
Before Citysearch, before BootsnAll and the like, VJ Beauchamp was looking for an opinionated online guide to the places she liked to travel. A Seattlite had created a cranky Seattle restaurant guide, but restaurant, motel/hostel, record stores, book stores, and the like in other places had no guide to celebrate them online. Initially known as the Portland Low-Budget Guide, she started writing about food, and by 1997 had expanded to include accomodations, radio, ATMs, beer, cinema, navigation, lesbian/gay/bi/trans resources, freebie publications, and links.
Since 1996, alt.portland has been exploring Portland, looking for good deals and fun stuff, looking for the sorts of things that underemployed, creative, alternative, young (or young at heart) folks would love.
The alt.portland guide switched from a static HTML web system to a dynamic content management system in September, 2005. Since then, daily entries highlight new and updated information.
Who does this?
VJ Beauchamp started her professional creative life as a music reviewer for such publications as Option Magazine, the Ann Arbor News, and Ann Arbor Current. After moving to Portland in 1989, VJ applied her zeal for pop culture, music, literature, history and geography to her new home. With a BA in Creative Writing, and an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, VJ is fueled by a passion to find resources and share them with others, and to make sure that the resources she shares are findable.