News : 10,9,8,7,6,5... Hurry!

To all of our wonderful readers and supporters of Vinton Today,

I want to thank you once again for your support!

For the second year your response to our request for donations has made us realize the importance of this service to our community.

Many of you sent in a donation along with a note expressing your appreciation for the job that we do...that is the fuel that keeps us going, thank you!

At the end of May, we will quit bugging you for a donation toward this effort and wrap up our site improvements.

We are always appreciative of every amount sent in, whether it's a ten dollar bill, or more. We know that each dollar you send is a part of your hard work and we want to continue to put it to work here as well.

Some of the improvements you aren't able to see have been on the backend of the website, making the site work more effeciently.

As we continue to grow and the content of the site grows, we are finding that we have to adjust the ways in which our information is stored.

With a few tweaks here and there, we have been able to adjust the settings so that we can find our information much more effeciently.

I suppose sometimes the numbers that surprise us, may not do much for you, but for us, we take a look and say, "WOW!" for example, we are closing in on our 10,000th story!

We are making our way to our 6 MILLIONTH visit to the site!

That's pretty impressive for our little town!

We've found that while most of Vinton knows that we are here, as well as many in the county, we find that our readers extend to many of the former residents of this great town. It makes our day to get a note from someone who went to school here, or moved away decades ago, and yet they JUST discovered Vinton Today.

We have been able to use this new technology to link nostalgia and the love for a ittle town for some of our readers, and that is awesome.

For me, it has been a fun to reaquaint myself with folks I knew as a kid.

This year we had a donation come in from someone, and it included a short sweet note thanking us, and explaining how they had such fond memories of Vinton and raising their daughter here..

I looked at the name and thought, "I wonder if this is..." So I sent along a thank you for the donation with a note that said, "Are you by any chance M..'s mom" Sure enough, it was the mom of one of my sisters friends from school.

Over the years, my sister would say, "I wonder what happened to M." Not knowing how to find out, it was just a bit of, trivia out there that we figured we'd never know the answer to.

We also received a donation from my former science teacher, who taught me in the 5th grade at Lincoln.

I don't remember much about the class, other than I liked that teacher, and at that time she was expecting her first baby, and I thought she looked so cute :)

So while maybe for our readers it may JUST be a news source you turn to, for me, it's been a joy to run across old acquaintances and has allowed me to reflect on the wonderful time I had growing up in such an awesome community.

Now I'm getting longwinded, like the other half of this editorial pursuit,, so I will wrap it up.

We will quit asking you for your donations in a few days, but we wanted to remind you once again, that we can still use whatever you can afford to send in.

Simply make your check out to: Vinton Today Fund, mail it to: Vinton Today, P.O. Box 7, Vinton, Iowa 52349

And as always, THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts for your kind support!