About this site

Background and General Principles
The core purpose of Oberon Matters is to publish high-quality, independent, public interest news journalism for the Oberon local government area and immediate surrounds with a desire to strengthen the area's sense of community.

The mission is a strong focus on local issues, broad coverage of news, community announcements and public notices and a high ratio of news content to advertising material. You can read more about this here.

Oberon Matters develops and publishes all content in accordance with the Australian Press Council guidelines and the MEAA Code of Ethics.

The publisher, editor and journalist is Peter Bowditch. You can find out more at his web site.

Relevance and readability
To qualify for publication, articles must have specific relevance to the Oberon LGA, including the villages such as Edith, Burraga, Black Springs and O'Connell, plus the towns of Tarana, Hampton and Rockley, that is, they must be about activities or events that have happened, or which are happening in (or involve people from) those areas, or which have an impact on the area.

Because the publication is not national in nature, national (or global) issues will generally not be canvassed, except as they affect one of the areas mentioned above.

We actively encourage all groups and individuals in the area to contribute their news, opinions and items of interest for publication, including Letters to the Editor. Letters to the Editor must include a full name and contact phone number to be published and are subject to these guidelines and our final editorial discretion.

To ensure that Oberon Matters serves its purpose, all content must be readable including coherent writing, good spelling and grammar.

Funding
This site will always be free to anyone who wants to visit and read the content. To cover the costs associated with running and publishing the site content we accept paid advertising and also donations through the Buy Me A Coffee system.

Neutrality and independence
Oberon Matters does not have an editorial policy on anything. That is, we take no sides on any contentious matters but will report every point of view provided the discussion remains within the normally accepted boundaries of manners and the law. Political arguments, for example, will be identified as either paid advertising or as opinion with the author clearly identified. Any appearance of bias will be because one side tells its story and the other decides not to.

Artificial Intelligence?

See Editorial - The use of AI

This site follows the Data Protection Principles recommended by the NSW Information and Privacy Commission. If you have any privacy concern about the site, please A copy of the Data Protection Principles is available at:
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/privacy/private-nsw-health-service-providers/data-protection-principles

The only identifying information about visitors to the site which is examined or kept is that which is provided voluntarily by someone sending email to the site owner.

The only time web server logs are looked at is when it is necessary to do so to solve site management problems. The traffic recorded in the logs is not analysed in any way except to produce consolidated statistics such as numbers of visitors and page displays.

Cookies
Note that this site does not use cookies. A cookie is a piece of information that an Internet web site sends to your browser when you access information at that site.

Anonymity of sources
The identity of confidential sources will not be revealed, and as far as practicable, we will ensure that any personal information derived from such sources does not identify the source. This does not mean that the people are anonymous to Oberon Matters, just that we will protect privacy when requested. If you don't want to tell us your name we don't have to take any notice of what you say.

Visitor statistics
July 2, 2026

Here is what has happened around this site over the last three months

Month	Unique visitors	Most read page in the month
April	8,533	The craft shop moves and having moved, sells on
May	10,231	Review: "AI Snake Oil" by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
June	15,656	Some good news for a change (2024!). This hit the top spot in the last two days of the month, edging out This week's Moron Alert which had been at the top since the day it was published. Strange days indeed.

The number of unique visitors during June reported by the server log analysis software was 22,692. This was adjusted downwards by the 7,036 attempts to access the Wordpress administrator login page. Just as well I don't use Wordpress, isn't it?

I have access to three ways of counting visitors:

AWstats is a program accessed through the cPanel site management system at the web hosting site. It seems to be highly regarded.
Weblog Expert runs on my computer using data from visitor logs downloaded from the web server. It has a bug which causes it to give absurd results for certain counts. I have been using it for years but it's no longer supported by the developer, and as it seems unreliable anyway I won't be using it in the future.
A system with the rather generic name of Analog Stats, also accessed through cPanel. The results are a bit of a dog's breakfast, but as the developer's web site isn't secure (HTTP instead of HTTPS) and also causes Norton 360 to throw a fit about the danger of going there because of a possible virus it looks like another one to be avoided.

What all three have in common is that they all show traffic increasing month by month. The numbers aren't all the same because they all use slightly different ways of gathering and processing the data but they roughly agree. A big number of visitors come here each month.

"Unique visitors" counts IP addresses that have connected to the site at least once during the month. It doesn't include search engines, but even if it did Google and Bing (who index the site at least once a week) would only be counted as one visitor each. Put another way, it is the lowest estimate of the number of visits to the site during the month.

See also: What do those statistics mean?

Some technical matters.

The Technology
Several pieces of technology are used to manage and maintain this site.

Web hosting software is nginx running on Debian Linux.
Microsoft Expression Web 4 is used for overall site management and editing individual pages.
A Microsoft 365 Access database holds information about site pages plus some more information used to maintain the site. Access with the help of Excel writes out files that Expression Web uses to build the sitemap file that Google and Bing use to index the site.
Progress WS_FTP 12 is used to transfer the pages to the server. This program allows both transfer of single pages and a semi-automated process that transfers all changed pages in a batch.
Nobody like broken links, so link checking is done occasionally using Xenu's Link Sleuth.
The software used for analysis of visitor statistics is AWstats integrated into cPanel at the hosting server.
The site search system used to be based on the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine. A change at the hosting service stopped this from working so now search requests are passed across to Bing.
Style sheets are maintained with TopStyle.
The majority of still photos taken for the site are done with a Nikon D5600 camera, with the occasional still from a Nikon 1 V3 camera or a Zero-X Vega drone. If nothing else is available at the time, photos might be taken using a mobile phone (currently a Motorola g54 5G).
Basic image processing is done with Adobe Photoshop, with occasional tweaks (such as batch resizing and watermarking) done with NCH Pixillion Image Converter. Photo collages are built using NCH PhotoPad Image Editor. Photos are renamed from what the camera calls them using Bulk Rename Utility.

They might be expensive, but the AI products from Topaz Labs can do some amazing things to zoom and clean up photos.
Videos recorded for the site can come from a variety of devices - a phone, a Xero-X 50 action camera, the Nikon D5600 or a Zero-X Vega drone. NCH PhotoStage Slideshow Producer is used to produce slideshow videos from collections of still photos.
Video processing is done with Any DVD Converter or Adobe Premiere.
When music needs to be edited it is done with Audacity or Adobe Audition.

Videos
Videos are displayed using the HTML5 protocol.

Browser compatibility and standards
Style sheets used comply with CSS Level 3 specifications. As with HTML5 used to display videos, all modern versions of the usual browsers support this and if yours doesn't you need to upgrade. In most cases upgrading is automatic and happens whenever an update is released.