Nearly three times a month, Charles Fulton logs onto his website and blogs something into the internet void.
“There were no guidelines, just, ‘Write about what’s interesting to you,’” said Fulton, Lafayette College’s manager of web development. “What’s interesting to me is tech and trains and bad movies.”
Fulton started his blogging journey in the early 2010s, around when Lafayette began experimenting with WordPress, encouraging its employees to blog to learn how the new platform worked. Today, just a handful of college employees keep the art of the blog alive.
Ken Newquist, a director in the information technology services division, is another member of this small faction of Lafayette’s Sites platform bloggers.
“The blog’s been around for a long time, and I think my friends appreciate the occasional keep-alive post talking about the latest book I’m reading, or the current Seeing Eye puppy that my family and I are raising,” Newquist wrote in an email.
Newquist, who’s been posting on the site since 2009, described himself as being “somewhere between a lapsed blogger and a casual one.”
“When blogging started out, it was a radical change from the static websites that existed at the time,” he wrote. “It used to be a pain to update your website; blogging made it easy.”
These days, most Lafayette blogs have been all but abandoned.
Newquist credited the disappearance of blogs in general to the emergence of other social platforms like MySpace, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and “their various clones.”
“The thing that blogging gets you that those other platforms don’t is long-form content. You can write to your heart’s content about whatever you want, and there’s no character limit,” he wrote.
Christopher Ruebeck, an economics professor, maintained a Lafayette blog until 2020. Despite having 43 pages of blog posts, most from the early 2010s, Ruebeck claimed he has never identified as a “blogger.”
His posts often directed his audience to articles and podcasts on a sporadic selection of topics, anything from whimsy to maps to unemployment.
“I didn’t say too much in the posts, so it’s not like the number of original words is very big,” he said.
To Ruebeck, his blog posts present a different image than the rest of his site.
“This is also a place where it’s kind of my professional presence,” he said. “I think some people would see that as a little bit more of a boundary. I’m not as good at the boundary.”
Others, like civil and environmental engineering Professor Mary Roth, haven’t entirely given up hope that their blogs will continue.
“It’s more just been an exercise in writing and occasionally sharing,” said Roth, who began sharing her teaching-related musings online after returning from a sabbatical in 2015.
“It was a useful way to think about different things,” she said. “Often it was in response to questions or conversations I was having more than once. I started thinking, ‘I should write about this and really see what I think.’”
These days, Roth rarely uploads to her blog, though she confirmed that she maintains a list of potential topics. According to Roth, she is simply waiting on the right mix of time and inspiration to “sit down and put them into text.”
