How time flies.  Six months ago today we had just published our first articles, telling you about the Kalkan Belediye election results.  

We also told you about the new hot air balloon transfer service to Dalaman.  Well, it was April 1st after all.  (Would you believe that at least one person tried to make enquiries).

Time for reflection on our first 183 days.  What have we been up to?

To be honest, the size of our audience has taken us a bit by surprise.  Here are a few statistics, for those who like that kind of thing.

• We have published over 250 local news articles (mostly local, with a few other interesting stories and features thrown in)
• The average number of web pages viewed per month is over 500,000
• The average number of web pages viewed per day is over 17,000
• Our busiest time of the day is lunch time (UK)
• KTLN is viewed in 71 countries (UK:70%; Turkey:25%; Other:5%)
• Now serving members with over 110,000 webcam images per day - just wait until we get our third webcam!
• We serve another 7,000 webcam images per day on other websites with a KTLN feed

In May 2009 we set up The KTLN Trust, and you donated an incredible £2,600 - about £800 of that via the online auction we held in June.  Some of the money raised has been given to the Kalkander Association and some to Kalkan First School.  See The KTLN Trust in the Main Menu, and look at the Donations Update page.  We still have funds to spend.  Any suggestions?

Every week, for 26 weeks, members have been able to read new articles for Day in the Life, Ten Second Turkish and Totally Trivial Turkish Titbits.

We have maintained a local Business Directory, which now contains over 500 Kalkan businesses.  We have also maintained an interactive Map of Kalkan, which plots the location of almost 450 businesses, or other points of interest.

We recently added a second webcam in Kalkan town, thanks to our friends at Mavi Bilgisayar.

What can you expect in the next 6 months?
Here is a preview of some of our plans.

We will be bringing online at least one more webcam.

We will be introducing very shortly our free Email Alerts service.  There will be a separate local news article on this.

We will be introducing free Local Ads.  We hoped to bring you that in September, but testing revealed some bugs, so we are now looking at a late October launch.

In response to your feedback we are just about to launch another feature, providing you with currency exchange rates from the main street in Kalkan.  You will still get the bank mid-rates for the last 5 days (right hand side of the home page).  However you will also soon be getting the bang up to date, 'live' currency buying rate on offer in town.

We will be bringing you the Kalkan Turkish Local News Treasure Hunt at the start of the 2010 season.  Should be fun.

We will also be inviting KTLN members to take part in a special survey, so that the Belediye, and Kalkan lovers in general can get a better understanding of the people who come to this wonderful town.  We hope you will all participate.  Individuals will not be identifiable in the published findings - we will simply publish summary statistics. 

And just to reassure you, the survey has got no commercial objective whatsoever - nobody will be contacting you to sell you anything!  More on the KTLN survey soon.

Plus of course, we plan to bring you lots more local news articles.

Katie-Ellen
Love KTLN.  Love Kalkan.