Why I did it!

Why I wrote Barepress

I have blogged on and off - more usually 'off' for nearly 20 years and like many people have used Wordpress throughout that time. It has often struck me that for pure blogging, Wordpress is overkill. In it's growth from a blogging platform to a CMS that incidentally covers blogging, for most bloggers Wordpress has become a living example of the Pareto Principle in action - 80% of what you do is delivered by 20% of the software - if not less.

Wordpress's software ecology has also proved troublesome. Plugins and themes have proliferated, and have attempted to become all things to all people. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when you're attempting to use Wordpress to build a full scale business application for someone, but for basic blogging?

And then there's the security and performance problem. If you don't maintain Wordpress, it becomes a target for every script kiddie in the area who wants to tag your site or install malware for spamming or other nefarious purposes. And performance - delivering a simple blog page shouldn't take several seconds. Ideally it should be 'Click the link' and 'Poof' - there you are.

So - why DID it take me all those years to come up with an alternative? Well, idleness, an attitude of 'It'll do', and the philosophy of life that was described by John Lennon - "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." In other words, there never seemed to be a good time or enough time - or a big enough problem - to make me look at migrating my own blog to a more efficient platform. Until now.

In the early summer of 2026 I became aware of a massive performance hit on a server I have that just ran a few instances of Wordpress with blogs on it. Examination of the logs showed that the problem was being caused by over-keen bots scanning the site for content for LLMs. The impact on the page delivery mechanism for Wordpress was such that even with a cache in place it was ramping up cache and CPU utilisation - and that was the weekend I sat down and wrote (with some AI assistance from Anthropic's Claude) - the first draft of what would become Barepress.

My underlying philosophy can be found here.

There's a basic manual for the features of Barepress here as well.

And you can sign up for a Barepress blog of your own.

Enjoy Barepress!

I'll be using this blog to keep you in touch with developments and hints and tips for getting the best use out of what I hope will become the choice for anyone wanting minimal blog.