old.rafeblandford.com
I've long had a placeholder landing page on rafeblandford.com... Friends Ben and Ewan used to mock (rightly) the rather outdated set of icons, but…
Writing
Essays and notes on product, technology and AI — and the transformation that happens where they meet: how it's changing the way we think, lead and work.
Building Author Authority for a Preserved Website
How do you establish E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for a website that's no longer actively publishing? Googl…
Adding Schema.org to 145k Static Pages
When you're running a live CMS, adding structured data is usually a template change — edit the theme, add the JSON-LD block, deploy. Every page ge…
What Google Search Console Actually Tells You (and What to Do About It)
A day after cutting over DNS for the three archive sites, the emails started. Google Search Console had opinions. Review snippets structured data iss…
Migrating 200,000 comments
When you host your comments on a third-party platform, you're renting your community. When the platform changes its terms, adds tracking, degrades…
Every Nokia N-Gage Game
Nokia's N-Gage is one of those platforms that everyone remembers but nobody really knows. The "sidetalking" memes, the taco phone jokes,…
Bringing N-Gage Home
Bringing N-Gage Home: Integrating Nokia's Gaming Archive N-Gage occupies a curious corner of mobile gaming history. It's not quite forgotten…
What 449k Forum Posts Tell Us About Symbian
Having recently restored the AAS forum, a fun extra projects was to generate some stats to get an after-the-fact sense of what was happening (and anot…
Bringing Back the Forum — 449,000 Posts
The All About Symbian forum ran from 2001 to 2013. At its peak, it was the primary English-language community for Symbian smartphone users — Nokia 765…
Claude Code as a Migration Partner
Over two days in late March, I migrated three websites containing 20 years of content from a dying CentOS 7 server to a modern static archive. The pri…
Optimising an old Codebase for Modern Web Standards
After migrating three legacy mobile tech sites to static archives, I had a working but underperforming set of pages. The HTML was from roughly 2020, b…
Preserving All About Symbian
Between the early 2000s and the mid-2010s, I founded and ran mobile technology sites: the big ones were All About Symbian and All About Windows Phone.…
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New writing by email
Occasional pieces on product, technology and AI — and how they actually play out in practice.