Turkey's For Life First Birthday - Part 2

Well, I know the first anniversary of Turkey's For Life was a couple of days ago but the post was getting too long...and then I didn't post yesterday...and so here's a slightly later than planned Part 2. 



As it's the start of a whole new 'blogging about Turkey' year for us, we thought we should take this opportunity to point out some of last year's achievements and one of the changes we made to the blog to make it more useful to you in the future. 



The change...

New search boxes

To make it easier for you to find what you are looking for in Turkey's For Life, we have changed the search box again. In the past, if you typed a word into the box, you would have been shown all posts containing that word and you had to scroll through them all to find what you needed. A tad laborious if the post you were looking for was way down the page. Also, if we had used Turkish letters and you used English letters, the post would not appear. 



Hooray! All that has now changed! We've changed the search box to 'Custom Google Search' and there is one at the top and bottom of every page in the left hand column. So now, if you type in a word or words, you will be shown a list (exactly like Google search results) of all our posts containing that word. You can do a quick scan for the post you're looking for. 



For example, if you type in 'kayakoy cin bal', any post containing those words will show in the search results. Posts containing kayakoy or cin bal in the title will be displayed first, and kayakoy and cin bal will be in bold lettering. And, Google being Google, if you mistype a word or use English instead of Turkish letters (or vice versa), it's very good at working out what you are looking for, so the search results should still be accurate.

Fethiye - Our beautiful Turkey blogging base

Some Achievements

In our first blogging year, we...

• Took action to actually start Turkey's For Life and fortunately, you decided to read it.


• Set up a Twitter account; created a Facebook page; joined the food bloggers' site, Foodbuzz; joined the travel bloggers' site TBEX; joined the expat bloggers' site Expat Blog; set up a Flickr account and created a Turkey's For Life Flickr group, and as a result, communicated with countless people and ended up very busy on the laptop! (There are others but we'll be here all day...)

Achievements in themselves, but we are also very proud of...

• Our 'Lonely Planet Featured Blogger' badge. Some of you may have noticed that this has only recently appeared on the blog (it's half way down, on the left if you haven't seen it.) It should have been there since April but, well, it's there now. We applied to the Lonely Planet Blog Sherpa Programme in April and were really pleased to be accepted. Occasionally, we submit a post that we feel would be useful to people who are looking for information about Fethiye and other places in Turkey. Through Blog Sherpa, our post about Kayaköy was selected as a 'favourite' and featured on the front page of the BBC World website. Not bad!


• To top our first blogging year off nicely, we were voted into the daily Top 9 by other Foodbuzz users for my attempt at a Turkish dish; spicy cheese and spinach börek.

And for this year and years to come?

• Well hopefully, we will be able to keep posting and Turkey's For Life will keep improving and growing...inşallah!

Turkey's for Life is a Favourite Blog

Expecting a mushy disaster - we actually got rice fritters

Remember this photo? This is a photo of the outcome of a recipe we attempted (and then posted) for rice fritters. Afterwards, people said to us, 'Oh, we made those rice fritters. They're really good. Nothing like we expected.' 



They are fantastically good (I'm not exaggerating - they really are nothing like you expect) and the recipe was from Sarah at Foodbridge. Sarah was one of the first people we 'met' online (on Twitter) and we hope to meet her in person one day. Her blog is all about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine and travel. She recently travelled to the Republic of Macedonia and Sweden and is a bit of a champion of hunting out and exploring local food markets wherever she is (you can see why we like reading her blog.)



Anyway, why are we going on about Sarah and Foodbridge? Well, as we're nearing the end of this year, she's listed her favourite food blogs of 2010. There aren't too many in this list - just the ones she likes to read - and as you might have guessed by now, we've made that list. Woo hoo! Thanks Sarah. Of the other blogs she links to, we already subscribe to four of them so it appears we have very similar tastes. Click the following link to see all of Sarah's favourite food blogs of 2010 on Foodbridge.