almanah.by.ru was the website of the literary almanac of the Faculty of Philology at Lobachevsky University (UNN), running from late 2002 on the free BY.RU hosting service. The home page introduced itself plainly: the heading "Literary Almanac of the UNN Faculty of Philology" and the greeting "Welcome to the website of our literary almanac!", as the home page reported[1]. The site's Nizhny Novgorod affiliation is recorded right in the page markup: the keyword list began with the words "almanac, literary, student, UNN, Nizhny Novgorod, university, philology faculty, philological"[1]. Web-archive snapshots span 2003–2005, and only one of them — from December 2003 — actually has content.

What the home page looked like

The home page's layout was extremely simple: a heading, a greeting, a "Site News" feed marked as current "(as of 12/19/2003)", a service link "Back to top" and a footer "Write to us"[1]. There was no postal address or phone number with a city code on the home page — the only contacts were two mailboxes on free email services: the editorial board's (adelaida-star@mail.ru) and the webmaster's (godo@pisem.net)[1]. No visitor counters appear in the saved text of the home page.

The site's structure can be reconstructed from the news feed: the sections "Almanac", "Authors", "About the Project" and "Site"[1]. The nn.ru directory card, from which the site made it into our sample (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating), adds a forum to the picture: according to its description, the site hosted an electronic edition of the Faculty of Philology's almanac, and readers could share their opinion of the texts and the project on the forum.

What the almanac managed to do

The news feed is essentially the entire chronicle of the project, and it fits into four months. December 24, 2002: "We now have a website. The first issue will soon be posted in the 'Almanac' section." On January 6, 2003, several texts appeared in the "Authors" section and the design changed. On January 7, an editorial foreword was posted in the same section, "About the Project". On January 26, several more texts were added to "Authors". On April 12, 2003, came the main entry: "The first issue of the almanac has been posted", which was also available as an archive in the "Site" section, while "Authors" hosted materials that had not made it into the printed edition of the almanac[1].

That last phrase matters: the almanac had a print edition[6], and the website was its electronic continuation and a place for texts that had not fit on paper. The print side of the project is documented by the university museum: the almanac was conceived at the Faculty of Philology in the autumn of 2002 on the initiative of instructor Leonid Bolshukhin, with the support of students Nastya Kalashnikova and Ksenia Demeneva, and the first issue came out in 2003 under the title "Slova" ("Words") — a 61-page booklet printed at the UNN press house in a run of 700 copies[6]. After April 12, 2003, the feed was never updated again: in the snapshot from December 19, 2003, the latest news item was still dated April[1] — the site had stood without updates for more than eight months.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s, the student almanac remained an almost invisible phenomenon. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating — we have no visitor-count data for it. In the results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, almanah.by.ru is not listed; moreover, that entire table contains not a single link to a domain in the by.ru zone[4] — sites on free hosting simply did not make it onto the contest lists. The only trace of its presence is a line in the nn.ru directory describing the project.

How it closed

The site was not shut down by its owners — it was closed by the hosting provider. BY.RU automatically archived resources that had gone untouched for a long time. The snapshot from February 9, 2005 serves, instead of the almanac, the service page "Document moved": "You have requested a page of the website www.almanah.by.ru, which has not been updated for too long, was deemed obsolete, and was moved to the archive"[2]. The same text also appears in the snapshot from May 24, 2005[3].

The date of the site's demise cannot be reconstructed from these placeholder pages. Both cite the same interval — "360 days ago" — but different last-edit dates: February 15, 2004 in the February version[2] and May 30, 2004 in the May version[3]. This means the date was calculated from the day of access using a fixed threshold, rather than taken from the hosting provider's own records.

Instead of the almanac's texts, visitors were served the hosting provider's advertising directory: "Hosting, Web design, Domain registration, Promotion," "Air conditioners, Vacuum cleaners, Refrigerators," "Plane tickets, Train tickets, Hot deals," and so on down the list[3]. The last home-page snapshot in the web archive is dated May 24, 2005[3]. A later check of the domain returns the heading "This domain may be for sale"[5]. Not a single issue of the almanac is available to us: the web-archive snapshots preserved only the home page.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (last snapshot) (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)
  5. almanah.by.ru
  6. museum.unn.ru — Student press of Nizhny Novgorod University