too many words

I've mostly been on Twitter, Reddit and Substack over the last couple years. You can be on these sites for hours and feel bored and overstimulated at the same time. No one says anything that original, because the algorithms reward rage-baiting controversies people are familiar enough with to respond to quickly. Everything is about speed of reply instead of true contemplation.

I've used twitter the most. I stopped using reddit because it felt like it was completely dead. Nothing is organic on Reddit, outside of a few hobby forums that I still like.

Twitter has the same problem but there are a few writers that I follow there because that is how they promote their work (again, we are back to reading sales pitches). But anytime I have personally participated on Twitter, I just run into a bunch of argumentative trolls and bots. It's just...kind of exhausting.

I've always liked substack but since they started pushing substack notes it seems like they are trying to turn their platform into another Twitter-lite.

I hate that there's not a way to escape ads and keep up with my friends online. I miss the old internet.

I miss when I casually taught myself coding because sites let you customize your profile. I was regularly using html coding to update my quizilla homepage and MySpace profile background.

I had used a computer since I was a kindergartner in the late 1990s, and I am also old enough to remember dial-up internet. However, before I was a teenager, I never considered the possibility of me creating anything on the web, let alone crafting my own space on the web, because at the time I only used the internet to browse the web.

That changed radically in 2006, when I was in my early teen and introduced to the concept of blogs and blogging by "Xuehai Weekly," a Malaysian-Chinese magazine aimed at secondary school students.

I was immediately intrigued by the idea of blogging for multiple reasons: I already had been keeping my own physical journal at the time, and as an autistic (although I was unaware of my autism at the time) kid who struggled with social and verbal communication skills, I always felt more comfortable expressing my thoughts and feelings through writing. Therefore, I decided to try out blogging, without even the faintest idea of how it would change my life forever, and not even just online life either.

Blogging was my first foray into creating things on the web, so it opened up a whole new world of me making stuff on the web. Even to this day, being able to publish your own writing that other people can see remains the most revolutionary aspect of blogging to me. As a child, I had dreams about publishing my writing, specifically a book, without knowing the process involved in traditional publishing such as pitching yourself to a publisher, getting your manuscript approved, working with editors, and so on. However, all you need to publish your writing on a blog is an internet connection and a place for you to post your writing on the web. It was no wonder that my writing-loving teenage self was blown away by the concept of blogging.

The benefits of writing, such as learning and practicing expressing and organizing your ideas through words, are shared by blogging as well, though blogging offers the additional benefits of connecting with other fellow netizens, including fellow bloggers by commenting the things we wrote. When I started blogging in the 2000s, every blogging platform I had come across implement comment sections to individual blogs, but gold old emails work just fine as well. In the 2000s, the Malaysian Chinese blogging scene was also large enough to hold occasional physical gatherings, and I had attended two of such gatherings myself.

An expected influence blogs had on my teenage self was choosing my future career path.

The same secondary student magazine where I learned about blogs and blogging for the first time also introduced a few bloggers, with one of them being the Taiwanese blogger Book, who was a web designer. I enjoyed Book's blog and was fascinated by the design of her blog, which included a Flash animation as the header. Meanwhile, I began to learn basic HTML and CSS to edit blog themes and add widgets to my blog, and was amazed by how these languages allowed us to customize our blogs, so through Book, I learned the existence of web design as a profession.

(Side note: I was pleasantly surprised to find out Book still blogs actively, now on boo2k.com, mainly about her travels with her family.)

However, since I did not personally know any web designers or developers at the time, nor anyone working in the tech field, I did not really know how to become a web designer. Later when I discovered graphic design as field, teenage me decided to pursue graphic design after graduating from secondary school, mistakenly thinking that it would give me opportunities to do web design work. I eventually ended up working as a graphic designer for 8 years, but I never got involved in web design, and other factors including disillusionment with capitalism and the corporate world, caused my burnout from the graphic design field.

The 2000s saw the rise of blogs. Unfortunately, as years gone by, the state of blogging changed with the rise of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. I was actually introduced to Facebook by a fellow Malaysian Chinese blogger in 2007, by pitching Facebook as a more fun social network platform than Friendster, which might be the most popular social network platform in Malaysia before the rise of Facebook. I did remember having fun on Facebook at first, especially with the games, before Facebook eventually blew up and became *the* biggest social media platform alongside Twitter.

While a gradual process, it was still noticeable that many Malaysian Chinese bloggers, myself included, had begun to move away from personal blogs to Facebook. At the time, I did not think much about the implications of personal blogs getting replaced by social media, as I was not aware of how the commercial parts of the web would grow large enough to be considered the mainstream by general internet audience.

Fortunately, my love for blogging never truly died, thanks to me discovering Tumblr in 2011. While Tumblr is also a social media platform, users are free to write long-form blog posts. The subject focus of my blog posts changed from personal ones in the 2000s to fandom ones, as my autistic self could not resist writing essays about my favorite entertainment media, and fandom activities were among the main things Tumblr became known for. Occasionally, I even got to make use of the HTML and CSS knowledge I learned in the 2000s to edit my Tumblr blog themes.

More importantly, Tumblr helped me realize I am queer, thanks to the large presence of LGBTQ+ people there, despite me initially following people there for fandom stuff. Tumblr was also an important place for me to start learning about leftist and left-learning politics more, and thus shaping my politics firmly on the left. The huge presence of autistic people on Tumblr made me fully realize I am autistic as well.

It was also through Tumblr that I discovered that personal websites and blogs were making a comeback.

In 2022, I discovered Neocities through a post on Tumblr that encouraged people to make their own websites. The notion piqued my interest, as I had never actually coded my own website from scratch, despite having heard of GeoCities, which Neocities is a spiritual successor to, and dabbled on HTML and CSS during my teenage blogging years. Therefore, I registered an account on Neocities, and started writing out the HTML and CSS of my first web page. Little did I know that making my own website would be another online endeavor that changed my life.

Coding my own website for the first time made me rediscover my interest in web design. Fortunately, compared to the 2000s, there have been a lot more resources available online to learn to code, including HTML and CSS. This time, I was deeply impressed by how much HTML and CSS had evolved since the 2000s, with the most notable game changer being CSS flexbox and grid replacing tables for styling a web page's layout.

Diving deeper into HTML and CSS led me to formally explore the web development field, starting with learning platforms such as FreeCodeCamp, and involving learning JavaScript for the first time. Meanwhile, learning that there are web and software developers who succeed in breaking into the field despite lacking a computer science degree, including those who previously worked in a different field, inspired me to switch my career path from graphic design to web development. Even as I aspired to become a professional web developer, my website that was initially launched on Neocities remained a great hobby project to practice web development.

After teaching myself web development and computer science through online courses, including FreeCodeCamp, Scrimba and CS50's Introduction to Computer Science, for nearly two years, I got my first web developer job in August 2024. While the job did not last long, I am glad to have gained at least some working experience in web development, with my proudest achievement being successfully developing a WordPress plugin despite having never done so before getting the job.

After launching my website on Neocities and continuing to work on it, I decided to continue my blogging journey by adding a blog to my website in January 2023. I was pleased to find out later that there has been a resurgence of personal blogs as well. As a result, I made a brand new personal blog in October 2024 that is different from the blogs on my hobby website and my more professional developer website, to both honor my blogging roots that go way back in the 2000s, and give my blogging journey a new beginning.

Making my own website opened the door for me to explore the web outside social media and the corporate web, the web that is referred by some as independent web, or indie web for short. The year of 2024 in particular was a major turning point of my relationship with the web, since it was the year I decided to become more active in participating in the indie web, by connecting with personal website owners. I explored other personal websites more through links, left messages on other people's guestbooks, sent more emails to personal website owners, and joined more webrings, pixel clubs, web cliques, and fanlistings.

Furthermore, I joined indie web communities, such as 32-Bit Café, which I joined in June 2024, and omg.lol, which I joined in September 2024. Both are wonderful communities consisting of both hobbyist and professionals who are interested in a better web, as well as fellow personal website owners and bloggers who have provided inspirations for my own websites and blogs. Socializing with other people on the indie web made me learn that if we want to have a community, we need to put effort in making connections with and reaching out to other people, instead of relying on a particular platform, online or offline.

Making my own website and blog, as well as participating in the indie web helped me to cultivate a more meaningful relationship with the web, by carving my own space on the web by building personal websites and blogs, getting involved in communities outside corporate social media and pursuing web development as a career to help to build the web. I am a person who finds more satisfaction in creating stuff than merely consuming stuff, so my websites and blogs have been fantastic outlets for me to contribute to the web, as a netizen who grew up with the internet.

I am grateful of the indie web and its communities for making the effort in building a web outside corporate influence, for rekindling my interest in web design and web development that leads to my career transition to web development, for inspiring me to restart my personal blogging journey, and ultimately, for changing my online life for the better.

Hopefully, I can continue to contribute to the effort of building a better web, because the web has changed my life.