krotnn.r52.ru was the site of Krot-NN, a Nizhny Novgorod manufacturing firm that produced roofing material made of stainless steel coated with titanium nitride to imitate gold. The company was founded in Nizhny Novgorod[1], and the site ran in the Nizhny Novgorod regional domain zone r52.ru, which also hosted the firm's mail — krotnn@r52.ru[2]. The copyright notice on the home page showed the year 2001[1]; the last home-page snapshot preserved in our sample is dated 29 May 2010[3].

Technology and products

The entire home page was devoted to describing a single product. According to its text, the technology for coating metals with titanium nitride had been developed by a group of staff from the "Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences" (as worded on the page) and was based on plasma-arc deposition of titanium in a nitrogen atmosphere; the development, the home page stated, contained inventions protected by a patent of the Russian Federation[1]. The coating was contrasted with electroplating: it was claimed not to corrode, oxidize, or tarnish[1].

The product was a 0.5 mm stainless steel sheet coated with titanium nitride, with a maximum size of 1.5 sq. m[1]. Technical specifications for the material had been developed and approved by the State Standard of the Russian Federation (Gosstandart), and a hygiene certificate had been obtained from the state sanitary and epidemiological inspectorate (Gossanepidnadzor)[1]. The price for 2003 was listed at approximately 950 rubles per sq. m; further down the same page an unremoved fragment of an earlier version of the text survived, giving a price for November 2000 of 800 rubles per sq. m[1].

Besides roofing, the page listed possible applications of the coating: finishing for artistic items, picture frames, furniture glass and fittings, automobile parts, stucco moldings, tableware, samovars, church vessels, and interior finishing for concert halls, restaurants, and banks[1].

Domes

The home page named church and monastery construction and restoration as the material's main application. According to its claims, roofing produced by Krot-NN had been used on more than a hundred Orthodox churches and monasteries — the dioceses listed included Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir, Moscow, Tyumen, Kaluga, Samara, Stavropol, Ulyanovsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Ufa, and others[1]. One church was mentioned separately — built, as the home page stated, with the blessing of Patriarch Alexy II in the Yamal region near Salekhard: its domes were said to be covered with the Nizhny Novgorod-made material[1]. Within the scope of our survey we were unable to verify these claims against independent sources — they are presented here as the firm's own statements.

What the site looked like

A snapshot from 3 October 2003 shows a page with no pronounced navigation: the heading "KROT-NN | About the Company," the caption "© 2001 Krot-NN," and, to the side, a short block of links — "Coding," "Info-online," "Hosting," "r52.ru." The same page carried a notice of its listing in the business-site directory of the Rusmarket.com portal, under the "Chemistry" category[1]. The rest of the page was taken up by a continuous block of text about the technology, in places duplicated twice[1].

By April 2005 the site had been redesigned: it now had the heading "KROT-NN - titanium nitride, gold-look roofing materials," the mail address krotnn@r52.ru, and a five-section menu — "ABOUT THE COMPANY," "PRODUCTS," "CONTACTS," "GALLERY," "Q&A"[2]. A snapshot from 29 May 2010 shows exactly the same layout, with not a single change to the heading or menu[3]. The web archive did not preserve the sections' contents: in the 2005 and 2010 snapshots the home page's text is limited to the heading, the address, and the list of menu items[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site entered our survey through the nn.ru directory, where it was listed as "Krot-NN Company" — in the section where local firms submitted their addresses. It represents a type common in those years: a corporate calling-card site for a manufacturing firm, living in the shared infrastructure of the local provider r52.ru — the domain and the mail both hosted there[2]. Sites like this did not compete for an audience: krotnn.r52.ru does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, no votes for it are recorded in our data, and it is absent from the published results of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[4]. For more on how this sample is built and what it measures, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating and the overview article on the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

The 2010 snapshot is the last text-bearing copy of the home page in our sample: the web archive holds no later versions with content[3]. According to our survey, the domain krotnn.r52.ru no longer exists; the material we gathered contains no information about the site moving to another address. The archived home-page snapshots say nothing about the fate of the Krot-NN company itself.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2010 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)