// Long-form blog posts.
window.BLOG_POSTS = [
  {
    "slug": "slow-web-design",
    "title": "Notes on slow web design",
    "date": "May 2026",
    "tag": "Craft",
    "read": "8 min",
    "deck": "Most websites are designed in a hurry and it shows. Here's what changes when you let a project breathe.",
    "body": [
      "The current default for a marketing site is six weeks, end to end. Discovery, design, build, launch. It works, in the sense that things ship. But everything you've ever made in six weeks feels like it was made in six weeks.",
      "Slow web design isn't an aesthetic. It's a budget — of time, attention, and revisions. You give a homepage three rounds instead of one. You write the copy twice. You print the site out and read it on paper. None of these are profound. They're just things nobody is paid to do anymore.",
      "What you get back is harder to describe. Pages feel composed. Spacing has reasons. The copy isn't competing with itself. Visitors don't notice any of it directly — they just stay longer, scroll further, and trust you a little more by the time they get to the form.",
      "If you can't justify the timeline to a client, try this framing: 'we're going to make this once, and not touch it for two years.' Most six-week sites get rebuilt inside eighteen months. Slow ones don't."
    ]
  },
  {
    "slug": "portfolio-is-a-product",
    "title": "Your portfolio is a product, treat it as one",
    "date": "Mar 2026",
    "tag": "Career",
    "read": "6 min",
    "deck": "A portfolio that converts treats its visitor like a customer, not an audience.",
    "body": [
      "Every freelancer's portfolio is, structurally, a landing page. It has a hero, social proof, a pitch, and a CTA. We just don't talk about it that way because 'portfolio' sounds more artisan.",
      "Once you accept that, the obvious product questions kick in: who's the visitor, what do they need to feel before they email you, and what's the next action you want them to take? Most portfolios skip the last two.",
      "Three things move the needle reliably: putting one strong piece above the fold, naming the kind of work you want next in plain English, and making the email link impossible to miss. Everything else is taste.",
      "Your portfolio is not a memorial to everything you've made. It's the shortest possible path from 'who is this person?' to 'I should hire them.' Cut accordingly."
    ]
  },
  {
    "slug": "marketing-for-engineers",
    "title": "Marketing for engineers who hate marketing",
    "date": "Feb 2026",
    "tag": "Marketing",
    "read": "11 min",
    "deck": "You do not have to become a different person to get customers. You just have to be findable and clear.",
    "body": [
      "There's a kind of engineer-founder who treats marketing as a moral failing. They want the product to speak for itself, which is a lovely sentiment that has bankrupted a thousand startups.",
      "The reframe that works: marketing is documentation. It's the docs your future customer reads before they know they're your customer. Tutorials, comparison pages, write-ups of bugs you fixed — none of these are 'marketing' in the cringe sense, but they all do the job.",
      "The second reframe: distribution is a feature. Shipping a thing nobody finds is the same as not shipping it. Set aside one afternoon per release to write the announcement properly. Post it where your users actually read.",
      "You don't have to learn to be loud. You just have to stop being invisible."
    ]
  },
  {
    "slug": "rebuilding-rahim-ae",
    "title": "On rebuilding rahim.ae for the fifth time",
    "date": "Dec 2025",
    "tag": "Meta",
    "read": "5 min",
    "deck": "Why I keep rebuilding the same site, and what stays the same every time.",
    "body": [
      "This is the fifth version of rahim.ae. The first was Wordpress, the second was Jekyll, the third was Hugo, the fourth was Next.js, and this one is back to being mostly static HTML with a little React on top.",
      "Each rebuild lasts roughly two years. By the end of year two I want to write more and tweak the site less, which is always the moment to switch frameworks one more time.",
      "Three things have survived every rebuild: a long-form writing archive, a portfolio of five to seven pieces, and a contact section that reads like a human wrote it. Everything else has been replaced at least twice.",
      "The lesson, if there is one, is that the site is a habit, not a project. The framework is the part you change. The shape of the content is the part you don't."
    ]
  },
  {
    "slug": "boring-seo",
    "title": "The case for boring SEO",
    "date": "Oct 2025",
    "tag": "SEO",
    "read": "9 min",
    "deck": "The SEO that works for small businesses is unfashionable, unsexy, and almost entirely about doing the obvious thing.",
    "body": [
      "Most SEO advice on the internet is written for SEO agencies trying to sell SEO. It's full of words like 'topical authority' and 'entity SEO' and is mostly noise.",
      "What actually works for a five-person business: fix your titles, write one good page per service you offer, get listed in the obvious local directories, and keep your site fast. That's it. That's the program.",
      "The hard part isn't knowing what to do. It's doing it on a schedule. Boring SEO is the opposite of growth-hacked SEO — it's a year of small consistent edits, not a clever launch.",
      "If your business is local, add one more thing: a single page per location, with a real address, real photos, and real reviews embedded. You'll outrank most of your competitors inside a quarter."
    ]
  }
];