Opinion : 40,000 more reasons to say thanks....

That ain't gonna happen again for a while, I told myself Monday evening, as I looked at the surprising new Vinton Today daily page view total.

We have been seeing some incredible numbers in our stats pages for the past few weeks.

Two Saturdays ago, we had well over 15,000 page views -- three times our average Saturday total.

I cannot say for sure what stories people were reading that day; my best guess is that someone was passing around the Iowa Firefighter's Convention story that the Vinton and Garrison firefighters sent us to announce that event. Usually, when we have a large number of page views, we also receive many comments, which help indicate what people are reading. That Saturday, we had very few comments.

Then this past Monday, after putting the updates of the two accidents (Highway 30 fatality and Vinton motorcycle accident) on the web site, we saw the numbers begin to increase.

Then I heard about the butter cow vandalism and published my column. The numbers began to rise steadily throughout the afternoon. Then Monday evening, people who liked my column (along with a few who disagree with me) began passing it around.

We watched the numbers go up, faster and faster.

Finally, at 11 p.m., when our counter resets to the next day, we had 21,400 page views -- nearly 6,000 more than our earlier record.

This time, I could tell from our comments, both on our Facebook page and Vinton Today, that the two accident stories and especially the Butter Cow column were the most popular.

In fact, in the past two days, approximately 19,000 people have seen that Butter Cow column since I published it late Monday morning.

I figured the numbers would decrease on Tuesday, but I was wrong.

The morning began with our charts clearly indicating that people were still reading my column more than anything else -- actually more than everything else on our page combined. I thought we might come close to 20,000 again.

But by 10:30 p.m., we had surpassed Monday's total. By 11, our counter had tallied 21,853 total page views.

I doubt we will repeat that tomorrow.

However, I said that last night, too.

And again we say thanks to all of you: For reading, sharing, passing on the word, for everything you have ever done to help Vinton Today keep doing what we do.

It's not just our milestone; it's yours, too.