mebel.nn.ru was a Nizhny Novgorod thematic server called "Furniture in Nizhny Novgorod" that operated in the early 2000s[1]. The site was devoted to the city's furniture market: showrooms, exhibitions, and home furnishing. As the home page stated, "The server was created on the initiative of, and with the assistance of, the City Fund for Entrepreneurship Support"[1]. The domain belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod nn.ru zone, and the resource itself was listed in the city's Counter.nn.ru rating for 2000 — that is, it was part of the local network rather than a nationwide project.

What the site looked like

The home page was arranged in the simplest way possible: the title "Furniture in Nizhny Novgorod" with a vertical menu of fifteen sections beneath it[1]. The reference section consisted of "furniture showrooms," "showroom pages," and "exhibitions"; the editorial section of "recommendations," "your apartment," "style," "fashion," "history," "the fifth element," and "news"; the service section of "print publications," "similar resources," "creators," "mail," and "advertising on the server"[1].

This set of sections reveals the intent: not a showcase for a single firm but an industry-wide city portal. Showrooms received their own pages on the server, readers were offered advice on furnishing an apartment and reviews of fashion, and the "advertising on the server" section shows that the project expected to earn money from furniture companies' advertisements. The "print publications" section pointed to the print press on the subject, and "similar resources" to other sites of the same profile: a manner typical of the turn of the 1990s and 2000s — gathering around a topic everything that exists both online and offline.

Neither a mailing address nor a phone number appeared on the home page itself — all the specifics remained in the internal sections, which are not represented in the surviving snapshots[1]. The text of the home page has survived in the KOI8-R encoding, common for Russian-language servers of that time.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The mention of the City Fund for Entrepreneurship Support in the server's signature explains the site's origin: it was not a private home project but a resource that arose with the participation of a city business-support structure[1]. In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet at the turn of the century there were few such industry servers: most sites represented a single company rather than the market as a whole.

According to the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, mebel.nn.ru was listed in the 2000 rating in the "Projects" section with a score of 0.08 — one of the lowest in the sample. The catalog description repeated the home page's menu almost verbatim: furniture showrooms, exhibitions, recommendations, "your apartment," style, "the fifth element," fashion, showroom pages. In other words, the intent was broader than the eventual audience: traffic remained low even by the standards of the city rating.

How it closed

Judging by the archive, the site fairly quickly stopped developing. The earliest snapshot of the home page is dated December 3, 2000[1], and the snapshot from September 23, 2002 repeats it word for word: the same title, the same menu of fifteen items, the same signature about the City Fund[2]. Over nearly two years the home page did not change by a single line — a sign that the project was frozen shortly after launch.

The last snapshot in the web archive is dated July 12, 2017. By that point the address www.mebel.nn.ru no longer served the site but a service directory listing of the web server: "Index of /" with a single file, index.html, dated April 14, 2017, 3 KB in size, and the signature "Apache/2.2.22 (Debian) Server at www.mebel.nn.ru Port 80"[3]. That is, the domain still pointed to a live machine, but no content of the furniture server remained on it. As of today the domain mebel.nn.ru is not active.

Only two copies of the home page and a list of its sections have survived from the project. The internal pages — lists of showrooms, an exhibition calendar, articles on style and fashion — are absent from the archived copies collected, and there is nothing today from which to reconstruct their content.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Domain snapshot, 2017 (archive)