covex.nn.ru was a personal home page of a Nizhny Novgorod webmaster who signed as Covex. It lived in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nn.ru: the earliest Web Archive snapshot is dated 16 May 2001[1], the last dates to April 2008. The site was listed in the nn.ru directory, in the "Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents — Personal Pages of Nizhny Novgorod Residents" branch, with the description "NNRU Covex Text" and a "Rating: 59" mark that linked to a counter card on Counter.nn.ru under number 10590[2]. Its content was photographs, a diary, homemade web trinkets, and a guestbook right on the home page.

2001: an open directory instead of a site

In May 2001 the address served not a page but a file listing: "Index of /", with an Apache/1.3.11 signature for www.covex.nn.ru at the bottom[1]. The root held the directories bin/ and public/ and three scripts — config.php3, setup.php3, and test.php3, last modified on 15 May 2001; the oldest entry in the listing dated to June 2000[1]. At this point the site was still being assembled, and its service files were visible to any visitor.

"I am Covex": the page of the mid-2000s

By September 2004 the home page title read "I am Covex — About Me", with a menu on the left of a dozen-odd items: "My works", "My diary", "My photos", "Sometimes I ride an ATV" [SGM], "Sometimes I play BC", "Something to read", "Something to download", "Send someone mail", "Cuss someone out" [Naasit'], "Your IP address", "Solo WebCam"[3]. Nearby stood links "Chats" and "Fight Club", and a line "Diamond materials, diamond tools, abrasive materials, abrasive tools"[3].

By the autumn of 2006 the list had grown to nearly twenty items and turned biographical: "My empty LJ", "My dwelling", "My little Sasha", "My child is growing", "My other half", "My job", "Unix time", as well as "Log in", "Sign up", and "Update details" — the site had gained its own visitor accounts[4]. In the snapshot from 2 January 2008 the menu is different again: "JooS", "My little Sasha", "My Lenochka", "My Dwelling", "Torrent", "Your IP address", "HTTP headers", "Unixtime", "This is me"[5]. The set of items shows what such a page was: a mix of a personal diary and a showcase of homemade PHP tools — showing the visitor their IP address, request headers, machine time.

A guestbook on the home page

The home page opened with a "This is me" section featuring a photograph that the home page said was taken "with a hidden webcam"[3], and below ran a feed of dated comments — from 15 January 2004 to 16 February 2006[4]. The owner replied in the same feed, and an "Add comment" form stood at the bottom of the page[3].

The correspondence shows the early layout was not the owner's own work: a guest under the handle Rey demanded "copyright for my layout" in May 2004, to which Covex replied that he had "heavily reworked" the old version[3]. Browser compatibility was also discussed: visitors complained that the menu disappeared after a few scrolls and did not show in Firefox, while the owner replied that everything worked fine for him[4]. The guestbook also doubled as a reference desk: asked where to go skydiving, one visitor answered with the address of the Nizhny Novgorod site sky.nn.ru[4]; another guest introduced himself in February 2006 as "Sanya K. from Bor"[4].

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

covex.nn.ru was an ordinary representative of the home pages of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet: in the nn.ru directory it stood among similar personal sites with descriptions like "Just a home page" and "Bald Mountain", and its neighbors in the section carried marks such as "Rating: 4", "Rating: 1", or "Rating: none"[2]. Against this background, "Rating: 59" is the only surviving figure about its traffic, and a notably higher one than its neighbors'[2]; how the counter itself worked and what its numbers meant is examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. In the results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004, the site does not appear — neither under its domain nor under the name Covex[6].

How it closed

According to our snapshot index, the Web Archive crawled covex.nn.ru 36 times; the last visit is dated 10 April 2008, and in the snapshot from 2 January 2008 the page was still working and the menu was in place[5]. Later the address stopped responding: today the domain covex.nn.ru does not exist, and our liveness check does not open it.

The snapshot record notes that later Web Archive requests to the address redirect to the diary at covex-nn.ya.ru; a snapshot of that diary survives from February 2011[7]. All that remains of the site itself are archived snapshots of its home page from 2001-2008: a file listing, a menu of a dozen and a half items, and a guestbook with two years of conversations.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents section, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2008 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Diary at covex-nn.ya.ru in the Web Archive, 2011 (archive)