If you can’t be kind, at least be vague. - Judith Martin
Memory Lane
WNTS Digest - 11th Anniversary
I started writing The Digest in the third quarter of 2015. I was filling in as temporary General Manager until we could find a permanent one to take over the leadership of the store. I had some time on my hands and was kicking around how to fill it when I remembered an idea I saw in a hotel in Winslow, Az. called La Posada. (Wonderful hotel BTW) In the lobby, they had a chalk board and on it was some simple trivia that happened on that day as well as the weather forecast of sunny, hot, cold rainy or whatever the day was going to bring. I stole some of those ideas and came up with the WNTS Digest. As I was temporarily living at the time in Why, I would spend some time each morning putting together those trivia facts, weather, a cute Pet Picture of the Day from Freekibble.com and an ad hoc picture of something I talked about in the Digest. I would then print the two pages out and tack it to our Bulletin Board in front of the store. The two pictures to the left are from a copy of the Digest that was published in or around February 2016. Eventually we found a permanent GM and I went back to my home in Northern California. A few months later, I was asked to stand up a website for the store and because I didn’t need to be at the site, I was able to do my work in California. When designing the site, I wanted to incorporate the concepts of The Digest. It had paused publication when I moved and here was an opportunity to bring it back in electronic form.
So, over the years, I made a few changes to the format, but it still has the basic constructs I started out with. The ‘Weather’ report is now the 'Current Weather' and is displayed as a widget on both the Home Page and The Digest. We kept Today in History, Born on this Day, Today is (national quirky holidays), moved Pet Picture of the Day to its’ own page, which later became a contest for Pet of the Month. The static graphic that referenced something in The Digest became “Why Nutts!!” and transitioned into a YouTube related video to something I referenced in The Digest. We added a ‘Quote of the Day’ but transitioned that into ‘Joke of the Day’ after I felt that the quotes were getting to bizarre, even for me.
And that is how we got here and looking for the next ten years!!
- Digester, 2025