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.

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.

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Privacy Policy

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. (The software used for the analysis is WebLog Expert).

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 are not revealed, and as far as practicable, we will ensure that any personal information derived from such sources does not identify the source.

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Some technical matters.

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

• Web hosting software is Apache 2.4.57 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.
• Ipswitch 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. It also runs automatically each day to collect visitor statistics.
• Nobody like broken links, so link checking is done occasionally using Xenu's Link Sleuth.
• The software used for analysis of visitor statistics is WebLog Expert.
• The site search system is based on the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine.
• 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.
• 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 KB X450 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.

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.