About this site

Here are some comments about site policy and administration

Background

My name is Peter Bowditch. During the 1970s and early 1980s I competed in rallies, both as driver and navigator. I was also on the other side of the fence as an official, both at the organisational level (I set several rallies in the Oberon/Bathurst region as rally director and was heavily involved in running others) and as a worker bee (for many years I was a control official at both the Australian Rally Championship round, the Bega Valley Rally, and at the international Southern Cross Rally).

I sold my car and retired from driving in rallies at the end of 1981 for reasons that don't matter now (I hung around as a navigator/codriver for a couple more years). In 2015 I moved to Oberon to go into semi-retirement and soon noticed a lot of familiar landmarks. Nostalgia broke out.

Part of my semi-retirement was to reinvent myself as a freelance journalist. I had been writing about science for many years, and after a few months driving around the roads and forests near my new home I thought that perhaps as part of the journalism reinvention I could get back into rallying, not as a competitor but as a spectator with better access. The decision was made easier by the fact that there would be several rallies in the district during 2016. I got myself CAMS accreditation as a journalist, and this web site will be used to report on the events and to practise my writing skills as I learn how the game has changed over the last few decades. In 2022 I got tired of rallies not happening because of weather and COVID19 so I relieved my boredom by branching out to cover other forms of motor sport such as hillclimbs, motorkhanas and khanacross. In the middle of 2022 I became a staff journalist at Australian Community Media. While my main brief was writing for my local paper at Oberon, ACM has publications across Australia and they are only too happy to carry my rally stories in papers which cover the areas where the rallies occur. The first of these out-of-town stories appeared in my first week with ACM, so I was rather happy with the arrangement. The only problem was when something I had to cover for the paper clashed with a rally that I'd like to go to and in these rare cases the paper won out. I left the Oberon Review at the end of 2023 and now publish my own weekly local news outlet at Oberon Matters. The same rules apply as before, the news site has to take precedence over my hobby, so Ausrally.Com will be taking a holiday as I establish the new publication.

Because this is a work in progress and a hobby, the layout, appearance and maybe even content might, and probably will, change from time to time as I tidy things up and decide on better ways to do things. And if you are wondering about that red thing at the top of the page, you can find out about it here.

I'm a member of two car clubs. Both run excellent events.

The Technology

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

• Web hosting software is Apache 2.4.57 running on 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. I know that programming and style sheet coding can be done with Notepad, but good tools are useful and make life easier
• Until the end of 2018, still photographs were taken with a Canon SX170. At the last event in 2018 the camera sacrificed itself by breaking my fall when I became entangled in blackberry vines. As the quote for repair approached what I had paid for the camera, it was replaced in 2019 with a Nikon D5600.
• Basic image processing is done with Adobe Photoshop, with occasional tweaks (such as batch watermarking) done with NCH Pixillion Image Converter (there is a free version but I paid a fee to get a few more features). NCH PhotoPad Image Editor is used to create photo montages (apparently it could replace Photoshop completely but I don't need to learn how). Bulk Rename Utility is used to rename the hundreds of photos from what the camera calls them to the names I want to use here. They might be expensive, but the AI products from Topaz Labs can do some amazing things to zoom and clean up photos.
• I've used a variety of video cameras with mixed success. (Some videos have been recorded using the video capability of still cameras - this will continue where appropriate.) In 2019 I bit the bullet, opened my wallet and bought a GoPro. As all the software associated with it was useless (including the mobile phone app that wouldn't install on my year-old phone) it was soon back at the shop. It was replaced with a Kaiser Baas X400 action camera - half the price of the GoPro, more than twice as good. I managed to break the X400 in November 2021 and it was an easy decision to replace it with a KB X450.
• Video processing is done with Any DVD Converter.
• It's not really technology used to maintain the site, but when I'm out in the forests I keep in touch with what's going on using a GME TX665 hand-held UHF receiver to monitor what officials are saying to each other.

Not really technology, I suppose, but these are the cars used to record the in-car videos. You can see why I don't try to record anything at competitive speeds.
1993 Falcon used up until 2019	2001 Commodore used from 2020 onwards

Videos

Videos are displayed using the HTML5 protocol. If your browser doesn't support this standard there's not much I can do except suggest you upgrade to something modern.

To minimise the chances of people stealing my work or hunting me down for copyright violations*, no videos on this site are indexed by any reputable search engine. Also, nobody can show any of the videos here on any other site by simply linking.

* I've had four spurious claims of copyright violation submitted to YouTube. The claims were made using obviously false names or over videos which didn't contain a single pixel created by the complainant. In all cases YouTube removed the videos without asking me first.

Browser compatibility and standards

Style sheets used comply with CSS Level 3 specifications. As with HTML5 as mentioned above, 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.

Privacy Policy

I follow the Data Protection Principles recommended by the NSW Information and Privacy Commission. If you have any privacy concern about my activities, please let me know. 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 information about visitors to this site which is examined or kept is that which is provided voluntarily by someone sending email to the site owner.

I will not sell or provide any details obtained through this site or through any other of my activities to anyone unless ordered to do so by a properly constituted court with appropriate jurisdiction.

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
Please 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.

Funding

This site and the travel etc that I have to do to get the pictures and stories are funded by spending my own money plus a small pittance from photo sales. If anyone wants to pay me to do this you know how to contact me.

Photograph Sales

I'm not really in the professional photographer business, but if you want have enlarged, high quality copies of any of the photos on the site you just have to ask. Prices depend on how many photos you want and whether you want prints or can make do with digital copies. If you want to use the photos for commercial reasons a different price scale will be negotiated.

Photo enquiries should be sent to .

Copyright

The majority of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

What this copyright means is that you are free to copy and reproduce anything on this site which is not otherwise copyrighted (such as material obviously the work of people other than me), provided that following rules are observed:

For more information about Creative Commons, please click the image at left.

Acknowledgement of Country

Rallying happens all over the place, so this is appropriate:

In the spirit of reconciliation I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. I pay my respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.