magna.r52.ru was the site of a Nizhny Novgorod wholesale food company, ZAO "Magna," which operated on the r52.ru domain from at least October 2001 to March 2007[1][3]. The site represented a firm that sold food products in large wholesale lots; the listing on the earliest surviving snapshot includes "Nizhny Novgorod, N. Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod Region" and "large wholesale, wholesale purchase, wholesale sale"[1]. All three known snapshots of the home page carry a notice about r52.ru hosting[1][2][3].
Home page
The snapshot from October 2, 2001 preserved the most substantive version of the home page. Under the heading "ZAO 'Magna' — wholesale food products" ran a long string of listings, apparently aimed at search engines: the city spelled four different ways, the region, followed by "food products, wholesale, large wholesale, wholesale purchase, wholesale sale, purchase, sale, bulk wholesale"[1]. The page had almost no original text of its own: as the home page put it, "We are glad to welcome you to our site!" and "It's profitable to buy products from us!"[1]. At the bottom stood the copyright notice "© 2001 ZAO 'Magna'" and a developer credit — "Coding by Info-Online"[1].
By October 2003 the site had been redesigned. What remains of the page in the snapshot is the title "ZAO 'Magna'::," the word "Home," the copyright notice "© 2002 ZAO 'Magna'," and a new author credit — "Web Design: NikJEHummer"[2]. Neither an address, nor a phone number, nor the names of any managers appear in the preserved text of the home page snapshots.
Product range
The only substantive list of goods survives in the snapshot from March 2, 2007. By this time the heading had turned into a product list: "ZAO MAGNA — wholesale food products: Yoshkar-Ola canned meat, condensed milk, Pomidorka tomato paste, packaged grains, Bonduelle vegetables, canned fish"[3]. The same set repeated in the body of the page: "We offer: Yoshkar-Ola canned meat, condensed milk, 'Pomidorka' tomato paste, packaged grains, 'Bonduelle' vegetables, canned fish"[3]. The footer credits, meanwhile, had not changed since 2003: the same 2002 copyright notice, the same "Web Design: NikJEHummer," the same r52.ru hosting[2][3].
Our web-archive sample includes only home-page snapshots; there are no price lists, order forms, or separate pages about the company among them. In essence, the home page functioned as a business card for the wholesaler: a list of items and an invitation to buy.
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
"Magna" belongs to the mass layer of corporate sites that made up the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a small company page on local hosting, built by an outside developer and left unupdated for years. The site entered our survey via the nn.ru directory, where it was listed with the description "Wholesale sale of food products" (see Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating).
In our surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, the address magna.r52.ru does not appear; it has no ranking or votes in our survey — we do not know the site's measured traffic. Nor is the domain mentioned in the results table for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote of 2004[4].
How it closed
The last home-page snapshot in the web archive is dated March 2, 2007[3]; no later requests to the address were archived. As verified for this survey, the domain magna.r52.ru no longer exists. What became of ZAO "Magna" itself, the surviving pages do not say; in our sample, three home-page snapshots are all that remain of the site, one of them a list of canned goods and grains that the Nizhny Novgorod wholesaler was selling in the mid-2000s.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)