tmk.r52.ru was the site of PKF TMK, a Nizhny Novgorod metalworking firm, at the address "3 Marshala Voronova Street" with three city phone numbers on the 8312 code[1]. The third-level domain sat in the Nizhny Novgorod zone r52.ru, where the firm's mail was also registered — tmk@r52.ru[1]. Surviving snapshots of the home page date to 2007, 2018 and 2020[1][2][3]; according to the inventory this article is based on, web archive visits to the domain begin on 6 January 2002, with 58 recorded in total.
Metalworking and dacha goods
In the nn.ru catalogue's classifier, the firm was listed under "Firms (Enterprises): Industry: Metallurgy" with a description of its contract work: "All types of metalworking. Stamping work. Polymer coating. Turning work. Milling work. Locksmith work. Welding work."[4]
The home page itself was arranged differently and spoke first of all about finished products. As the home page put it, the site was called "Children's sports complexes, strength trainers, greenhouses and hotbeds, barbecue grills, smokehouses — PKF TMK", and the same list made up its entire menu: children's sports complexes, strength trainers, a greenhouse, a hotbed, a barbecue grill, a smokehouse[1]. The contract side of the business was reduced to two lines — "All types of metalworking" and "Polymer coating"[1]. The catalogue entry and the firm's own site thus described the same production from two different angles: custom metal work — and its own line of welded products for home and garden.
One page, unchanged for thirteen years
The site was a single-page showcase: a list of products, each with its own link, an address, the phone numbers "8-(8312)-75-40-09, 72-35-30, 72-35-31", an email address, a separate "Directions" link, and the caption "© TMK — a production and commercial firm"[1]. There was no news, no price list, and no order form on the home page — only the listing and the contacts.
Between the 2007 and 2018 snapshots, the home page text did not change by a single word: the same products, the same address, the same three numbers in the old six-digit format with the 8312 code[1][2]. The extracted text shows traces of manual template editing — fragments of closing comment tags "-->" and, hidden by them, an item reading "Sports equipment"[1]. By 2020 there were more edits: a fragment after the email address and part of the copyright line had been commented out, but the set of products and the contacts remained the same[3].
A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site entered the inventory of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet not through a traffic ranking but through the nn.ru catalogue. In its category it was listed among sixteen sites sorted by counter rating: figures were given for only six of them — 164, 71, 34, 21, 20 and 7 — while against the other ten, including PKF TMK, it read "Rating: none"[4]. The domain tmk.r52.ru also does not appear in the surviving Counter.nn.ru samples, so there is nothing to judge the site's traffic by; the methodology behind such assessments is described in the article on the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.
The domain does not appear in the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004[5]. This is the ordinary fate of a factory business card: such sites did not enter contests or compete for traffic — their address was printed on a business card and in advertisements, and the web merely served as an extension of the telephone.
How it closed
The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 18 January 2020, and the text on it is nearly word for word the same as thirteen years earlier[3]. The address tmk.r52.ru does not open today: the third-level domain in the r52.ru zone has ceased to exist, and our data shows no trace of the firm moving to another address.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2018 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2020 (archive)
- NN.RU — Classifier of the nn.ru catalogue, section "Firms (Enterprises): Industry: Metallurgy" (archived copy)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)