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  • Ken Ilgunas

New Look


I figured it was about time that I spruced up the old blog. If just for the different colors, I liked the above picture (that’s Duke Chapel in the background), but I never liked the name “The Spartan Student.” I thought it was a touch too self-promotional and I was always a little embarrassed by the whole thing. Plus, I haven’t been “poor” or “desperate” for a long time. And I’m more frequently pitching articles to magazines, so I desired a more professional look. The old look had to go.

I guess I need some sort of new title for this blog because my Duke years are over and my life is headed in a new direction. What that direction is, I’m not exactly sure, which is why I’m struggling to think of the proper words to capture the blog’s themes. (The new picture above is me standing on an unnamed mountain in the Brooks Range next to Walker Lake. It was taken by my ranger-friend, Adam.)


A couple other housekeeping notes:


– My new domain name is www.kenilgunas.com. You can access the blog by using this new address, or my old one (spartanstudent.blogspot.com). (PS: If you’re thinking of starting a blog, I can’t say enough good things about Blogger/Blogspot; they’ve really made it easy for the average person to make a decent looking website. Plus, the new domain name will only cost me $10/year.)


– I liked the narrow text columns I had in the old blog template (because I thought it made for some easy-on-the-eyes reading), but these new wider columns permit me to post really big pictures, which is a feature I’m excited about. If there’s anything about my new format that you find disagreeable, please email me or post a comment and I’ll see what I can do.


– In an effort to post more than once a week (which is a rate I clearly haven’t been able to maintain lately), I think I might do a “weekly quote” post. I have 162 single-spaced pages of interesting quotes/passages I’ve written down over the years–many of which aren’t to be found on the Internet. I thought such a weekly post would be an easy way for me to bring a little more activity to this blog; my life hasn’t been incredibly blog-post-worthy of late because I’ve been doing little more than book-editing for the past many months. Perhaps I need to find new ways to compensate.


– Anyway, thanks again for your readership. The comments and emails and well wishes are always encouraging. I never would have thought that I’d still be “blogging” after three years, but it’s been incredibly fulfilling.

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