Giles Turnbull

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Giles Turnbull, whose blog can be found at gilest.org.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is Giles and I like the internet.

That's the opening line I've had on my personal website, gilest.org, for almost as long as it has existed. Professionally, I run a tiny creative communication consultancy called Use the human voice, where I try to help organisations communicate more like humans do. My career started in journalism, a long stint as a freelancer, then a rapid shift into clarity-as-a-service when I took a job at the Government Digital Service, where I was part of the influential creative comms team. I’m still using things I learned there, from a huge cast of incredibly talented colleagues, on a daily basis.

I’m the author of The agile comms handbook and Doing weeknotes.

Outside of work I’m quite boring. I grow potatoes, I listen to music, I read books, I swim, I visit beaches, I fall asleep on the sofa on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes on other afternoons too.

What's the story behind your blog?

gilest.org started in the late 1990s, when I was working as a journalist at the Press Association in London. My job was covering the emerging internet scene; so learning the basics of how websites worked was essential background research. I taught myself basic HTML and never progressed much further than that, which is why my website still looks much like it did then.

In those days - hold on while I put on my slippers, perhaps you could drape that blanket over my knees? thanks - in those days ‘weblogging’ was a new and emerging idea. (Insert "OK grandma let's get you to bed" meme here.) There were just few couple of dozen webloggers in the whole of the UK, and most of us hung out on a mailing list when we weren’t actually reading one another’s blogs. Ask your grandparents about mailing lists.

Quite seriously, though: it was a tiny little scene, if you believe that tiny scenes can be a thing. People knew each other. We met for drinks, many times. Some people paired up and got married and had kids and everything. Imagine that: it was enough of a scene that it resulted in entirely new human beings being created. Amazing.

I was part of that scene - not bang in the middle of it, but part of it - and a bit older than most of the other participants. Many of them have gone on to big things since then. Having successful careers, building successful businesses. Some of them got Properly Internet Famous. It was enough of a scene to set people on new paths towards new things. More amazing.

So the website began as a place to write things down, and a place to put the photos I took with my Agfa e480 digital camera. And it stayed that way. The things I write down have changed somewhat, and the camera I use these days is a step up, somewhat, from the Agfa. But the website's job hasn't really changed much. It's just a place to be me, on the internet.

This is for everyone, Tim Berners-Lee said. Yes. Everyone should be able to have their own little part of it, and be able to sculpt that part however they wish. Here’s me, in my overalls, sculpting. Poorly.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

My website has been through many content management systems. It’s been on Blogger (back in the days when we trusted random strangers with our FTP server credentials, lol), it’s been on Greymatter (thank you, Noah Grey), it’s been on Wordpress. I think it once spent an evening running on Textpattern.

But I always, repeatedly, inevitably, come back to the same process I’ve been using since the 1990s: hand-written HTML files, terrible hand-coded CSS, and an incredibly simple file structure. It’s simple so that I can preview it on my computer without running a local webserver. I know. Look, it worked for me then, and it still works now. That’s why I don’t change it. If your needs are very simple - and my needs are, honestly, very simple - then why do anything else? A blog is basically just words and pictures on the internet, and you can do words and pictures on the internet very effectively, even if you’re hand-writing every page and uploading the changes via SFTP like some sort of cave dweller. Ug. Ug ug.

I use templates and text-replacement shortcuts to speed things up, of course. There's a snippet saved in Alfred that spits out the HTML for a new page for me - all I have to do is fill in the blanks. I have a macOS service that resizes my images for me. I avoid having to update navigation bars, headers and footers by not having any navigation, headers or footers. People can still read my stuff, and can still reach my home page in 2 clicks, from anywhere, if they even care. Which is unlikely.

I write things that feel like they might be useful or interesting to someone else, someday. I earn a small bit of my living telling teams and organisations that recording their thoughts on something that looks like a blog might be a good idea. In sessions with those clients, I trot out one of my favourite catchphrases: “A blog is your brain, over time, on the internet.” That’s the humdrum reality of writing a blog. You’re putting bits of your (team) brain online, at addressable, searchable, bookmarkable URLs. This is how the whole web was being made back in those days in the 90s. It seemed like common sense then. Still seems sensible to me now.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Not really, I can and do write almost anywhere, in all sorts of environments. I try to avoid writing when there's music playing that I could sing along to, because then I'll start singing along, and not much writing will get done. So I tend to play music I don't know when I'm writing.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Hmmm, maybe not. But actually - maybe yes.

My main concern is longevity. I really don't like being the cause of broken links. It bothers me. (I have done it, many times. Makes me shudder to think about it.) I want my website to last - ideally as long as I do, and ideally, longer than that. So the most important feature for me is that the website is easy to make, host, move, and archive.

(Tangent: the older I get, the more I start to think that true longevity means thinking about paper outputs, not digital ones. I’ve wondered about putting my best stuff into printed form, because that feels like it’s more likely to end up in the hands of my descendants, who of course will immediately say: “Why did this old man keep talking about tea?”)

Right now, if anyone asks me “How should I start a blog?”, I’m suggesting they use Pika. The team behind it seem to really care, and are doing everything right, and if anyone’s likely to care about longevity of web content, they will. Nobody has ever asked me that question, mind you, and I suspect nobody ever will.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I pay Dreamhost about £100 per year, I think? For an all-you-can-eat package that covers a dozen or so websites for me, my company, and a few friends and family. That’s probably a very expensive way of doing it, but I don’t have time to think about transferring everything to somewhere cheaper. I like Dreamhost. Their customer service has always been pretty good.

I don’t monetise my website. I don’t track visitors. I don’t use any analytics software. There are no cookies. None of that stuff matters to me.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Of these, only Sophie's website is a 'blog' in the traditional sense, but I admire websites like these because they’re making a contribution. It’s not about boosting the owner’s ego, it’s about giving something to the internet. That’s how the best of the web has always been, and still is to this day. I see people calling for a better web and I whoop and cheer my encouragement. To me, the common denominators are the simplest things: simple technologies for putting words and pictures on the web. Simple design, simple presentation, simple language. The simple act of giving something away, rather than trying to make some sort of personal gain.

The giving is the gain, I’d argue.

I often do work for corporates, governments and charities, and I say more or less the same things to them.

In some of those corporate work sessions, I ask the room: “What’s the first thing that comes into your head when you see this word?” And I flash up the word ‘BLOG’ in huge letters on the screen.

The reactions are all negative. People say things like:

“2009”

and

“Boring”

and

“Self indulgent”

… and - yes! Right? You can see why people say things like this. Those answers make perfect sense. The word ‘blog’ has this unfortunate baggage attached to it, because of what ‘blogging’ turned into, shortly before social media came along and influenced blogging back into the shadows of the web whence it came.

But I argue that the act of blogging - the act of posting thoughts and ideas and notes on the internet, in small doses, regularly and often - that act is incredibly valuable. Not just for people, but for teams. And for entire organisations.

That act is what creates archives, and those archives are the raw material that future colleagues, and future team-mates, can look back on and learn from. Blogging about work is writing documentation about your team and your project, for the benefit of colleagues who haven’t even joined you yet. I wrote a book about this stuff: The agile comms handbook. There are jokes about tea in that, too. I'm thinking about writing another one, called How teams remember. I'll get back to you about that.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

  1. Don’t break the Back button.
  2. Big up the RSS massive.
  3. It’s all just web pages in the end.