Opinion : Vinton Today readers still amaze us!

The 11th of March marked our 3rd birthday here at Vinton Today.

It was also a record breaking day for the most visits in one day!

As we pass our third birthday, I for one am simply pleased with the response of our wonderful community!

Having only worked with the "traditional" newspapers, I wasn't real sure how this was going to work.

At a newspaper, you have more than one reporter and a lot of people in advertising.

At Vinton Today, there's just Dean and I, working from our home office.

Dean carries most of the burden to get the news in, and between being mom/teacher/wife/daughter/sister I take care of designing ads and answering questions concerning advertising.

Occassionally, we meet with what I consider the creative department, Kurt and Lu. At any other job, it's NEVER fun to get called into the office. But in our situation, whenever we get a note saying, "Let's meet" I want to grin and say, "Now?"

It's always a fun time to get together and discuss Vinton Today. We discuss what we can do better, what's going great, improvements we need to make to the site and other areas of technology we need to be using.

The last area is where I sometimes feel the most challenged.

With the development of all the new technologies out there, we discussed a program we need to buy that will allow access to Vinton Today on all of the new gadgets that are constantly being released.

We have our annual hosting fees, as well as our technology bills to keep us up and running.

So again, it's time for our annual fundraising effort.

Many of these additional expenses had previously been absorbed by the Karr's up until our request for your help last year. For the first time, we actually ran in the black! We were also able to get a camera that both worked AND was capable of getting the great shots we previously couldn't get. We were also able to purchase needed software for the computers.

It's never easy to ask people to send in some of their hard earned money, to help this "newspaper" stay online, but we also feel that we've got something here that is well worth your investment.

Over the past year we've seen other websites begin to follow our example, as well as have some of the area TV stations come to us for their news coverage...something I don't remember happening at any other job.

Vinton Today is here because of the dedicated advertisers we have, dedicated contributors, and all of our loyal readers.

Once a year we ask our readers to send in a few dollars to continue this effort.

Sometimes, we have a large contribution, sometimes a small one...but every time, that donation goes right back into the website.

Take a few minutes to consider what you can do to help out.

These donations are NOT tax deductible, but out of the kindness of your heart.

Please mail them to: Vinton Today Fund, P.O. Box 7, Vinton, IA 52349 or you can drop them by Monkeytown, in care of Lu.

As always, THANK YOU, from the bottom of our hearts for your help to keep us running in the black!