This is Richard Bowen . com

Richard Bowen . com is

• A working demo of the software that creates the world's simplest totally scalable web sites (probably)
• the world's simplest totally scalable web site
• the brain child of Richard Bowen
• a well ranked site on Google, for the phrase Richard Bowen

Matters of Size

I've noticed as I've grown old that as things grow larger they grow uglier.

In 1999 (or there about) I created my first few web sites using HTML and a text editor. It was all pretty easy ... until I wanted to change something that was on every page.

I went database driven with headers/footers/navigation and eveything created on the fly. Useless for my kids' sites.

So then I started using template systems .... until I was spending more time writing templating utilities than using the system to create web sites. [OBVIOUSLY, Andy Wardley 's Perl Template Toolkit wasn't available at the time.]

Next I wasted years looking for a CMS that 'just worked'. Ditto blog applications. I call this period 'The Wasted Years', partly because of the time I wasted tring out other people's software but also becuase it was a time when I got wasted a lot. There may indeed be a link between the two.

In time, I concluded that my first attempts at web site creation (manually edited HTML files) were the most productive and I just needed a few simple utilities to help alleviate the repetition that manual editing can require.

This site is generated by . (pronounced dot)

So, in my quest to return to something that is small, simple and just works I created . (pronounced dot). It's small and simple and just works.

. is about 30 lines of Perl and it creates everything you see on this site including the menus, the submition forms and (soon) the database interaction. I'm prepared to go to 50 lines for the database functionality.

Of course, I've cheated a little. But I'm working on that. And I'm not too bothered as long as . stays SMALL.