A milestone!
February 6, 2025 in General News

They said it wouldn't last. They said it couldn't be done. They said all sorts of things. But they were wrong.

This is the 50th edition of Oberon Matters and over 300 articles of local interest have been published since the site went live on February 1, 2024. The number of readers has been constantly increasing and in some months over half the population of Oberon has a look at something. As Paul Kelly sang (in a different context) "from little things big things grow", and Oberon Matters intends to keep growing and featuring the "local news for local people".

Thank you to all the people who come here every week, who send nice emails and say complimentary things when met around town. You make the effort all worthwhile.

The staff here are very excited and are having a cake for morning tea.

A bit of housekeeping
January 30, 2025 in General News

Back from the Christmas and New Year break, there are some things that need mentioning.

• The page inviting contributions to the site has been updated to clarify the situation with media releases and to include some guidelines about how to submit material in the easiest way.
• People have suggested asking for donations towards the cost of running the site, and some investigating has been done.
  • One popular site for collecting donations wants people to put their work on the donation site in a subdomain (www.oberonmatters.theirname.com), presumably so visitors can be exposed to advertisements. Despite suggesting that a donation button on your own site will work, experience running another web site suggests that all you ever get from them is the occasional email saying that someone has committed to monthly donations. The money never turns up.
  • One donation site that looks very useful has a registration process that asks you to set up a username and password, tells you that everything is now OK and then rejects the combination when you try to log in. There is a link to receive an email to change the password but that email never turns up. All of this discourages enthusiasm about using the service.
  • PayPal seem to make the amount of paperwork outweigh any money benefit.
  • No, I will not set up my own credit card payment system. One benefit of the third party systems above is that they have to do all the worrying about security and privacy.
  • Still looking.
• There won't be a print version of Oberon Matters in the near future. Options were looked at but none were financially sustainable for a short print run.
• A suggestion has been made that Oberon Matters might return to that old standby of local papers - the announcement of births, deaths and marriages. This would depend on people letting us know about these things. Local Facebook groups seem to be the places where these are announced these days, but obituaries would fit in here.