A Brief History of Bumpkinlnad

Where to start, how about before the beginning. In 1986 I graduated high school and headed off to college at the University of Missouri - Rolla (Now University of Science and Technology). When I got there I moved into a dorm. As it turned out, the majority of the people on my floor in the dorm were from either St. Louis, Kansas City, or some other large city. I was not. I (and my roommate for the first year) were from the middle of nowhere. As such, we got labeled Bumpkin #1 and Bumpkin #2. For the record, I was Bumpkin #2 because I got there later than my roommate. Where do Bumpkin's come from, Bumpkinland of course. So, when I decided to start a BBS around 1990, I decided to name it The Bumpkinland BBS.

The BBS went through many iterations between 1990 and 1995. At it's peak, I had right at 500 members from all over the country. Most were customers who had purchased one or more of my BBS Door programs. A few were local users who called everyday to play the available games. I don't have access to all those older versions anymore, they are gone for good. But, what I do have is a complete copy of my BBS from 1995 right before I shut it down in favor of a website. Here are some images from the BBS. What you would have seen if you called in.

In 1995, i phased out the BBS and created the first iteration of Bumpkinland.com. Why am I not using that name now? That's an interesting story. In 1995, I was working with Poplar Bluff Internet, Inc. designing websites and doing programming. When I decided to start the website, the owner of PBII registered www.bumpkinland.com for me. But, he registered it in his name. At no point during the close to 10 year history of the site did he transfer ownership of the domain to me. So, when he went out of business, bumpkinland.com went with him. As best I can tell, he is still paying for it I have no idea why.

Anyways, back to the story of the site. In 1995 it started. The Wayback Machine didn't go back that far so I don't have any images of the early days of the site. The first image taken by the Wayback Machine was in 1997. Here's what Bumpkinland looked like back then. This was the whole main page.

At this point, I had the site divided up into two main sections. One for my business stuff of selling door programs and one for the games and other standard BBS type stuff.

The next couple of images are missing the inner pictures for the buttons and such. They weren't archived. You can however get and idea of the site design. Here's 1998.

These were the days of Link Exchange and Fast Counter. The stuff at the bottom of the page. The Link Exchange was basically advertising. Each time the page loaded you would get a new banner ad for something or some site. The Fast Counter is the little green box with a number in it, it counts page visits. I still use page counters I just don't display them on the page. I check them manually.

Next up, here's 1999 in two versions.

Again, the internal images were not archived. I kept this design for a couple of years. The next different design according to the Machine came in 2001.

The amount of content on the main page exploded with this version. It's actually quite long requiring much scrolling. What you're seeing here is the top 1/3 or so. Why I chose that color for those links I have no idea. Next up, 2006.

For this design, I went back to a more sparse main page. At this point, we (the wife and I) were selling Toy Fox Terriers. We did that for quite a few years. I was also selling bunkbed and dog house plans. I actually made over $1000 on the bunkbed plans. Let's move on to 2013.

This was the last design before the site shut down. It featured one of my favorite color schemes, green and purple. As you can probably tell from this site, I like green. This was also the first appearance of Dippy Games. The difference is this was the days of Flash Player. The games I was developing then were flash based. That went away. At least one of my games lives on however on an archive site. The original Dippy Combine Game is still around over a decade later.

For a few years I got disinterested in doing websites. At the time I was concentrating on programming, mostly for local businesses. It wasn't until 2021 that I decided to ressurect my website as blandsoftware.com (I still can't get bumpkinland.com without buying it). I also set about relearning everything I had forgotten about how to create a website. Here's the fist iteration of this site from 2021.

At this point I had starting doing mostly HTML5 canvas projects. As such, that category got huge while the others languished. That's why I decided to change the design. Here's the next version from 2023.

This vesion had all 100 projects with thumbnails and descriptions on the main page. I decided this wasn't ideal so I redisgned the site again to what you see today.

That's the end of the story for now. I'm sure I will redesign again soon. When I do I'll update the story here.