ginger.nnov.ru was a personal literary site called "A Refuge for the Lonely Soul" ("Приют одинокой души"), run by a woman from Nizhny Novgorod who signed herself online as Ginger; in the description of recent years she is named as Yulia Vinogradova[6]. The footer signature "Designed by Ginger, 1999" appeared on the pages from the earliest surviving snapshot[1], and the web archive's first capture of the domain is dated April 5, 2001[1]. The domain belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod zone nnov.ru; the content of the early home page also points to the city: in 2001 it carried a notice asking for help finding information about the author's acquaintance who had died in a road accident in Nizhny Novgorod, with a contact phone number in the long-distance format "(831-2) 694904"[1]. The site took part in the Nizhny Novgorod counter Counter.nn.ru and was listed among the entrants in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote of 2004[7].

Structure and content

The site's permanent menu consisted of six sections: "Favorite Poems," "A Trace of the Pen," "Comments," "Guestbook," "Self-Portrait," and "News"[2]. The home page was assembled from four blocks, two of which were refreshed on every visit: "Favorite Poems. Eight Random Lines" showed a random eight-line fragment of someone else's poem with a link to the author and the title of the piece, while "My Poems. Eight Random Lines" showed the same kind of fragment from the site owner's own texts, placed in the "A Trace of the Pen" section[3]. Between them stood the "Latest News" and "Latest Comment" blocks, the latter with an excerpt from the guestbook[2].

Among the poets whose work turned up in the random selection of other people's poems, the surviving snapshots include Anna Akhmatova[3], Marina Tsvetaeva[4], Olga Blinova[2] and Anna Bulatova[5]. The full circle of authors in the section is visible from the keywords on the 2001 page, which list Asadov, Akhmadulina, Akhmatova, Berggolts, Drunina, Kaputikyan, Krasnikova, Tatyanicheva, Tushnova, Fedosova, Tsvetaeva and Shakespeare[1]. At the same time, as the home page stated, the design used works by K. Vasiliev and B. Vallejo, and the site itself was presented in English as Ginger's online home with poems by the author and her favorite poets[1]. The footer showed the years "1999—2011," "1999—2014," "1999—2015" and, in the last surviving snapshot, "1999—2023": the end year was evidently generated automatically by the engine[2][6].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

According to the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, the site's rating figure is 376 — a modest number next to citywide portals, but a notable one for a personal home page. In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote of 2004, "A Refuge for the Lonely Soul" is listed among the entrants, having received no votes[7].

The site's actual audience is shown more precisely by the guestbook, whose entries were displayed on the home page. In October 2011 the most recent entry was from a reader in Tbilisi, who wrote that they visited the site often[2]. In April 2014 a visitor recalled having read one of the site owner's poems back in the late 1990s, and quoted a line as she remembered it[3]. In December 2014 a comment arrived from Kyiv[4], and it still showed as the "latest" as of spring 2015[5]. One more entry appeared in November 2021[6]. So the page kept being found and read for more than a decade after its author stopped updating it — a fairly ordinary fate for the literary home pages of the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

Standstill and closure

Substantive life on the site ended on September 1, 2008. That is the date of the last news post: "My apologies for the encoding problems," which went on to explain that a general migration of sites to MySQL 5.0 was underway and the author had not kept up with her own housekeeping[2]. The same news item and the same note, "Last updated: September 1, 2008, 12:32," appear on the 2011, 2014, 2015 and 2023 snapshots[2][5][6]. For fifteen years the site ran on its own: the engine dutifully kept shuffling eight-line excerpts and accepting guestbook entries, but nothing new was ever posted.

The neglect also showed in the footer. In the 2011—2015 snapshots, an unrelated line, "Cyprus Villas," sits under the copyright notice[2][5], and by 2023 that spot had been taken over by links to slot machines[6] — the usual sign that a site has long gone unwatched. The web archive's last capture of the home page is dated February 5, 2023[6]; after that, the domain vanished from the web.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, December 2014 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2015 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 2023 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)