Notes from SXSW London 2026
Notes from SXSW London 2026: redesign before technology, the reinvention window, and a greater-than-usual ambiguity around the AI hot-topics.
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.
BIMA 100 Tech & AI Pioneer
Named in the BIMA 100 2026, AI & Tech Pioneers category — recognition for cross-discipline product and transformation work at Digitas UK.
Running a Personal Server Without Thinking About It
The question that matters for a personal server: what happens when you stop paying attention? The monitoring and maintenance stack that answers it.
Preserving Flickr Archive with a Data Lifeboat
Two decades of press events, device launches and MWC show floors live in my Flickr archive. How I preserved it with a Data Lifeboat.
old.rafeblandford.com
My early-2000s landing page — Symbian, N-Gage, Jaiku, Ovi and some rightly-mocked icons — preserved for posterity at old.rafeblandford.com.
Building Author Authority for a preserved website
How do you establish E-E-A-T for a site that's no longer publishing? Making two decades of credentialed authorship visible to search engines.
Adding Schema.org to 145k Static Pages
Adding structured data is a template change on a live CMS. On 145,000 static HTML files from a CMS that no longer exists, it's a different problem.
What Google Search Console actually tells you (and what to do about it)
A day after cutting over DNS for the archive sites, Search Console had opinions. Setting up programmatic access and working through what it flagged.
Migrating 200,000 comments
Nearly 200,000 Disqus comments were part of the archive's editorial record. Migrating them to self-hosted Remark42 — and owning the community again.
Every Nokia N-Gage Game
A complete directory of every game developed for Nokia's N-Gage — released and cancelled — assembled two decades after the taco-phone jokes.
Bringing N-Gage Home
N-Gage's story is half-remembered jokes; the detail has been offline since 2020. Integrating Nokia's gaming archive back into the historical record.
What 449k forum posts tell us About Symbian
Stats from the restored AAS forum: what 449,000 posts reveal about the rise and fall of a technology community — things no market-share graph captures.
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New writing by email
Occasional pieces on product, technology and AI — and how they actually play out in practice.