General Manager’s Log – August 2015

It’s Live! The new AWBF News Blog is ready to go and we hope you’re going to enjoy it. Sincere thanks to the creative construction team: Tim Oxley (MarineDirectory.net), Rob Oates (Page design and photography manager) and Duncan Bridges (technical build and coding), for the enormous amount of work that went in to the project over many weeks. The project involved building a new site from scratch and then going through many hours of testing, correcting, inventing and improvising to make it work. No simple task, I promise you. The result is a lively forum for articles, notices, great photos and general news. And the bonus is, it will reach you sooner. The AWBF News Blog doesn’t replace our website, or our FaceBook page or Twitter account, so it might be a good idea to explain how these all line up, and how you can use these tools:

AWBF website – www.australianwoodenboatfestival.com.au

This is the main library and reference for the whole of the MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival. Here you will find articles on the festival’s history, a directory of all the registered boats at the last event, our photo archive, details of how to volunteer or get involved with the festival and much, much more. You can also get information on visiting Tasmania, where to stay and what else you can see and do while you are here. For Tasmanian residents, there are useful links to details such as parking, transport, amenities and maps. This the place to visit to learn as much as you want to about the largest wooden boat festival in Australia.

AWBF News Blog – awbf.com.au

This is a magazine-style publication with news, features, event listings and all the other current events that interest friends of the festival and everyone in the wooden boat community. Here you’ll find the latest photography, contributions from other maritime organisations and useful links to marine products ands services . Use our News Blog to stay up to date with what’s going on around Tasmania and interstate. Articles here will ‘retire’ to the archive as new stories come up, but you can always find previous stories by using the ‘Search’ function on the page. Just type in part of the title, the subject or category and we’ll take you where you want to go.

AWBF FaceBook Page – www.facebook.com/AWBFestival

If you’re an active FaceBook user, you won’t miss out on a thing, because we’ll be posting all new articles from the AWBF Blog News up on our FaceBook page, too. Catch the news, the best pictures, messages from our friends and followers – everything you expect from FaceBook including your chance to tell us what you’ve been up to. If you have something you think the AWBF audience would be interested in, don’t be shy! Tell us about it and we’ll get the message out to more than 4,000 people interested in everything maritime and of course, wooden boats.

AWBF Newsletter – awbf.com.au

If you like things the old-fashioned way – a message that pops up in your electronic inbox from time to time, we’ve got you covered. Once a month or so, we’ll send you a one-page summary of the latest AWBF articles and news. If there’s something there that interests you, you can click straight through to get the full story. Of course, if you want us to send you this message, we’ll need your email address. Even if you have signed on as a subscriber in the past, we would like you to update your details this month. People move, addresses change and we don’t always hear about it. If you would like to renew your subscription, just pop on to the News Blog page using the link above and enter your details.

AWBF on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube

These links will work just as they always have to give you fast access to follow your friends, find new ones, swap great pictures or catch up on the latest videos from the world of wooden boats and the people who love them.

That’s it for now. We’d like to hear from you. Please send your opinions, suggestions or your latest news to: manager@australianwoodenboatfestival.com.au. If you would like to contribute something for the next update of the AWBF News Blog, please note these guidelines:

1. Send us the text part of your contribution as an email or a Word document, without formatting or embedded pictures
2. Send us your photos as JPEGs, attached to an email message. The better the quality you give us, the better you’ll look on the page
3. Make sure you have permission to publish any photo you send us and give us the photographer’s name for the credit
4. Please don’t send PDFs or Word documents with pictures in them – we can’t use them

Best regards,

Paul Cullen
General Manager
Australian Wooden Boat Festival, Inc.