nelsonpires.com

Nelson Pires writes on nelsonpires.com that he doesn't use WordPress, and the alternative he names is aspBlast CMS, a content management system he wrote entirely himself. The site's own summary of his position is brief: WordPress "started out as a blogging platform," and he places his own CMS in contrast to it. The published material supports the fact of his choice and the name of his alternative; it does not lay out a detailed list of technical objections, so any specific reason beyond that framing should be read as his stated preference rather than a documented comparison.

What the site actually says

The article "Why I don't use WordPress" (dated 10 August 2019) opens with a short history: WordPress began as a blogging platform, and Pires recalls the early blogging era when Moveable Type was also widely hyped. He notes he even started his own blogging platform, which he never released. The excerpt on the site stops there — it does not continue into a point-by-point critique.

The companion article "What is aspBlast CMS" (20 November 2019) describes the alternative: "another CMS but not just any other CMS," 100% written by himself. He is explicit that it is not yet a marketable product, but says he has been able to develop a working system.

So the two articles together form one position: a developer who prefers to build and run his own tooling over adopting WordPress.

The alternative: aspBlast CMS

If you are evaluating aspBlast as an option for your own site, the site gives you no download link, license, feature list, or support terms in the material available. Treat it as a personal project described in a blog post, not a product you can currently adopt on the strength of these pages.

How to read this as a build-vs-buy decision

Pires's choice is a familiar one for developers: keep control of the stack and the codebase rather than inherit another project's conventions and release cycle. The trade-off is equally familiar — a self-built CMS carries the maintenance, security patching, and documentation burden on its author, which is consistent with his own note that aspBlast is still far from marketable.

If you are weighing the same decision, the practical test is scope. A personal site with a handful of article types, as on nelsonpires.com, can be served by a small custom system. A site that needs a plugin ecosystem, multiple editors, or hosted updates is a different problem, and the site offers no evidence that aspBlast is intended for that case.

Where to read the original arguments

Both posts are on the site's home page under "Software development and general topics," in the General category:

• "Why I don't use WordPress" — 10 August 2019
• "What is aspBlast CMS" — 20 November 2019

The home page excerpts are truncated with a "More" link, so the full reasoning, if any, sits behind those article pages rather than in the summary text.

The core approach is to never place a plain, machine-readable email address or phone number in your HTML. Instead, obfuscate it so browsers render it normally for humans while scrapers see nothing usable. Nelson Pires covers this exact problem on nelsonpires.com in his article "Protect your email and phone number from spam bots," framing it as a recurring issue: contact details shown on a site get harvested sooner or later, so they must stay hidden from bots yet visible to visitors. The methods below follow that principle; pick based on how much friction you can accept for users and how much maintenance you want.

Why plain text fails

Spam bots parse raw HTML, not the rendered page. An address like [email protected] in a mailto: link or a phone number in a tel: link is trivially extracted by regex. Hiding it with CSS (display:none, off-screen positioning, or color matching the background) does not help, because the string is still in the source. Any protection must ensure the actual address never appears as a contiguous string in the HTML delivered to the client.

Practical protection methods

1. JavaScript assembly

Store the address in parts and join them at runtime:

<a id="contact" href="#">Contact me</a>
<script>
  const user = "name";
  const domain = "example.com";
  const link = document.getElementById("contact");
  link.href = "mailto:" + user + "@" + domain;
  link.textContent = user + "@" + domain;
</script>

Input: the split strings in the script. Action: the browser concatenates them after load. Expected result: visitors see and can click the address; a scraper reading raw HTML finds only fragments.

Caveat: bots that execute JavaScript will still see the final value. This raises the bar but is not absolute.

2. HTML entity encoding

Encode characters as entities, e.g. name@example.com. Browsers decode these for display. Simple regex scrapers often miss them, but many modern harvesters decode entities, so treat this as a low-effort layer rather than a solution.

3. Contact form instead of exposed details

The most robust option: publish no address at all and route inquiries through a form. The address lives only on the server. This removes the harvesting surface entirely, at the cost of requiring form handling and spam protection on the form itself (honeypot fields, rate limiting, CAPTCHA).

4. Image rendering

Render the address as an image. Bots cannot read it as text, but users cannot copy it, screen readers may fail, and it is inconvenient on mobile. Use only when accessibility trade-offs are acceptable.

Choosing between them

For most sites, a contact form plus JS assembly for any displayed address gives a reasonable balance. If the address must be visible and clickable, combine JS assembly with entity encoding; neither alone is sufficient against determined bots.

Verification and common pitfalls

• Verify: view the page source (not the rendered DOM) and search for @ and your phone digits. If they appear as a readable string, the protection is not working.
• Pitfall: testing only in the browser's element inspector. The inspector shows the post-JavaScript DOM, which will always contain the assembled address. Always check the raw response.
• Pitfall: leaving the address in structured data (JSON-LD), meta tags, or sitemap files. Scrapers check these first.
• Pitfall: forgetting the phone number. The same logic applies: assemble digits in script or use a form, and avoid tel: links with the full number in the source.

The underlying rule from the source article holds: the information must be invisible to bots but visible to users, and that means keeping it out of the HTML that bots receive.

nelsonpires.com is the personal website of Nelson Pires, described on the site as a place for “software, development and general articles.” It is a collection of personal experiences, experiments, ideas, tips, and software notes rather than a company site, product page, or service offering. If you are looking for the author’s own writing on web development and related topics, this is the right kind of site; if you need a commercial product, documentation portal, or support desk, it is not that.

Who runs the site and how it is organized

The site presents itself as a personal publication. Articles are attributed to Nelson Pires and grouped under broad categories such as Development and General, with visible “Updated on” dates. That structure tells you two useful things:

• The content is authored and curated by one person, so expect opinion and first-hand experience rather than editorial neutrality.
• Posts are dated and occasionally revised, so older articles may reflect the tools and practices of their time.

The homepage is a running list of article previews. Each entry shows a title, author, category, update date, and a short excerpt, with a link to the full article.

What kinds of topics appear

The published pieces cluster around practical web development and personal commentary. Representative examples from the site include:

Two patterns stand out. First, several posts are about tools the author built or released, such as Verisso and aspBlast CMS. Second, several are opinion pieces explaining a personal choice, such as not using WordPress or not using Facebook. The mix is deliberate: the site’s own description frames it as “personal experiences, experiments, ideas, tips, software and much more.”

How to decide whether it is useful to you

Use the following conditions to judge fit:

• Useful if you want one developer’s practical notes on web topics — spam-bot protection for contact details, mobile-first design, IIS URL rewriting, server header debugging — or you are curious about small independent tools and CMS projects.
• Useful if you value dated, experience-based write-ups and are comfortable checking whether advice still applies to current versions of the software involved.
• Less useful if you need official documentation, guaranteed maintenance, or vendor support. The site is a personal publication, and posts like the IIRF article explicitly describe workarounds for specific version gaps rather than supported product guidance.
• Less useful if you want neutral comparisons. Pieces such as “Why I don’t use WordPress” are stated personal positions, so read them as one developer’s reasoning, not as a balanced evaluation.

A practical way to read the site

Start from the homepage list and pick by category and date. For development questions, open the Development entries first and check the “Updated on” line before relying on any version-specific instruction. For context on the author’s own projects, the General entries on aspBlast CMS, Verisso, and the domain-name post explain what he built and why. If a topic matches a decision you are facing — say, choosing a CMS or a rewriting approach — treat the article as a starting point and verify current compatibility with the software you actually run.

Adopting a mobile-first approach means designing for the smallest screen first and letting larger layouts grow from that base. On nelsonpires.com, Nelson Pires describes it as a "complete shift" in how he thinks about layout and content, having previously been a "desktop first design advocate." The site frames this as a personal account of changing his working method, not a step-by-step tutorial, so the practical value lies in understanding what that shift changes in day-to-day design decisions.

The core shift: from desktop-first to mobile-first

In a desktop-first workflow, the wide layout is the starting point and smaller screens are treated as a reduced version of it. Mobile-first reverses that order: the constrained screen defines the essential structure, and extra space on larger screens is used to add or expand content rather than to remove it.

The site's post "Adopting a mobile first design approach" (Development section, updated 25 May 2019) presents this reversal as the main idea. Pires notes he had "always been a desktop first design advocate," which makes the post a record of changing a long-held habit rather than a neutral overview.

What changes in layout and content decisions

Because the small screen is designed first, decisions that desktop-first workflows often defer become early constraints. Based on the site's description of the shift, the practical differences look like this:

The site does not publish a detailed method, breakpoint list, or tooling guide, so treat the table as the logical consequence of the stated shift rather than a checklist the author provides.

Why the author's experience matters for designers and developers

The post is useful mainly as a caution about switching costs. Pires describes the change as a "complete shift in the way I think about layout and content," which signals that mobile-first is not just a CSS adjustment applied at the end. Designers and developers considering the switch should expect to revisit content hierarchy and navigation patterns, not only column widths.

For a concrete case, imagine a page with a wide hero image, a three-column feature row, and a sidebar. Desktop-first tends to keep all three and stack them on phones. Mobile-first asks first whether the sidebar earns its place at all, then rebuilds the feature row as a single readable sequence before deciding how the extra width is used.

Limits of what the site covers

The nelsonpires.com entry is a short personal article. It does not include code samples, performance measurements, or a comparison of frameworks, and the site's other posts (such as those on email and phone number protection, aspBlast CMS, and why the author does not use WordPress) are separate topics. Readers who need an implementation procedure should treat the post as motivation and context, then consult dedicated mobile-first layout guidance for the mechanics.

aspBlast CMS is a content management system written entirely by Nelson Pires, the author of nelsonpires.com. According to the site, it is “another CMS but not just any other CMS” — the key distinction being that it is 100% his own code rather than a derivative of an existing platform. At the time of the site's update (20 November 2019), Pires described himself as “some distance away from having a marketable product,” so aspBlast CMS should be understood as a personal development project in progress, not a released or supported product you can download and adopt.

What the site actually says

The site's own summary is brief, and it is worth separating what is stated from what is not:

The page positions aspBlast CMS as a work in progress. The phrase “so far I was able to develop a system that…” suggests a functioning core exists, but the excerpt does not describe which capabilities are complete.

Where it fits on the site

aspBlast CMS is filed under the site's General category, alongside posts on domain names and why the author doesn't use WordPress. The site as a whole covers software development and general topics, with development posts on subjects such as protecting email addresses and phone numbers from spam bots, adopting a mobile-first design approach, and using Ionic's ISAPI Rewrite Filter on IIS8+.

That context is useful for interpreting the CMS post: it reads as one developer documenting his own tooling choices and experiments, in the same spirit as his explanation of why he avoids WordPress. The aspBlast CMS article is a project note, not product documentation.

How to decide whether it matters to you

• If you are looking for a CMS to install or evaluate, aspBlast CMS is not presented as an option — there is no stated release, feature list, or support channel on the site.
• If you are interested in independent CMS development, the post is worth reading as a short account of one developer building a system from scratch and where that effort stood in late 2019.
• If you want the author's broader views on CMS platforms, the companion post “Why I don't use WordPress” gives the reasoning behind his preference for his own approach.

Because the site provides no feature details or availability information, treat any assumption about what aspBlast CMS can do as unverified until the author publishes more.