From e-Zine to Newsletter

Peace be upon you, fellow digital wanderer.

It seems fitting to begin this first issue by reflecting on my online writing journey—where I started and how I ended up here.

I have been writing online since the early days of the World Wide Web. The first website I ever made was a Geocities page called “The Semi-Charmed Kinda Website” — a fan page for one of my favourite bands at the time, Third Eye Blind.

I remember that I had to type the HTML tags into a text box to make each page. No templating engine, no build steps, no web framework. Just plain HTML with inline styles. A skill that I later refined when I customised my MySpace page.

Later, I created an “e-zine”. This was around the year 1999 and 2000. There was already the concept of “blogs” at that time with platforms like LiveJournal and Blogger, but it feels more like an online diary to me. I wanted to write about certain topics like free speech and technology, not a personal diary.

I’ve always been fascinated by the zine writing subculture. The word “zine” — derived from its longer form “magazine” — is used to describe self-publishing DIY magazines. Usually, these are physical self-made magazines photocopied in bulk and distributed in niche groups. They are sometimes called 'fanzines'.

I never had the chance to physically own many of the zines from overseas, but there are low-quality scans online that I love to read. The teenager me loved the punk counter culture aesthetic of these zines. Later, as more people get online, zine writing has taken a new digital form, dubbed as “e-zine”, similar to how “mail” becomes “e-mail” for its digital form. They came in different forms—websites, downloadable PDFs, or plain text files with ASCII art.

I named my e-zine ‘The Nodal Point’. I’m sure there was a reason for the name, but I just can’t recall it. I wrote on the topics of freedom of speech and how we are not ready for it, topics on technology and how we are at the mercy of it. I wrote music and album reviews, and other things. The Nodal Point is also open to submission for folks to submit their write-up.

I never liked the personal diary-like format that blogging implied back then. It was around 2005 that blogs started to take on a different form. There are topical blogs now. You see blogs on consumer tech, on music, and on films. It’s no longer a personal diary. So I switched to this format.

In 2005, I coughed up some money and bought a cheap shared hosting plan that supported PHP, along with a domain name. I run selamber.com for a few years. I use PHP Nuke for the CMS, and later on, I set up phpBB for the forum section.

The website selamber.com and its forum never gained much traction. In the Malaysia internet sphere, there were at that time 2 competing forums that most people hang out. They are jiwang.org and lowyat.net. One is full of “warez” and the other one is full of Internet trolls. I made sure selamber.com does not have any of those, and that probably leads to its demise. It was barely a blip in internet history—forgotten, except in the depths of the Wayback Machine.

After taking a break, I moved to a new domain — jiboneus.com. It was slightly more successful than selamber.com. The website even made a few hundred dollars from Google AdSense. Peanuts, but for a student at that time, it was something. I still feel icky with the term “blog”. I opted for the term “webzine”, an homage to the e-zine days.

The jiboneus.com webzine publishes posts about music, film, tech, and arts. I have a soft spot for the indie subculture and everything DIY, so most of the things that jibonus.com covers are of the indie scene. Things were going well, jiboneus.com received media invites to concerts and other events. However, I was unable to make a living out of it. Adsense cheque doesn't come that often.

I decided to focus on being a software engineer. I joined a digital agency and later joined a ride-hailing start-up, where I stayed and built my career as a software engineer.

After nearly a decade away from writing, the itch has returned. I subscribed to X premium and wrote a few long-form posts. However, it does not feel right. X posts feel ephemeral—quickly pushed down the timeline and drowned in an endless stream of content. Your post is at the mercy of X’s algorithm to push it to other's timeline.

And now here we are, a newsletter. I love writing long-form, and I feel that a newsletter is a place for it. If you have subscribed to it, you’ll get it in your inbox. There is no ‘For You’ algorithm that decides who sees your post.

With Code & Codex, I wish to explore topics related to technology and culture. Deep contemplative thoughts on how modern society is shaped by technology and the corporations that exploit and engineer our dependence on it. I want to revisit some of the thinking that I have during “The Nodal Point” days.

It feels like we've come full circle. We left emails and blogs for social media, and now, we're abandoning social media to return to emails and blogs. Here, it feels that I am coming back to “The Nodal Point” but hopeful with a much more improved writing style and less cringy teenage angst.

Stay glitched, stay human.

Jibone.