nazarova.homepage.com was the personal page of Irina G. Nazarova of Nizhny Novgorod, featuring poems and her own translations from German, hosted on the free foreign hosting service homepage.com in 2000–2001[1][2]. The directory of the "Nizhny Novgorod On-Line" portal placed it in the section "Society and People: Personal Pages of Nizhny Novgorod Residents" and described it with the line "poems and translations from German by Irina Nazarova," marked "Active" and dated 01/06/2000[3]. The surviving snapshots of the home page span the period from August 2000 to February 2001[2].

A threshold page

All three snapshots preserved in the web archive — from August 24, 2000, and January 24 and February 1, 2001 — show the same introductory page, and the text on it did not change over that time[1][2]. There were no poems on it: visitors were told they had reached the home page of Irina G. Nazarova and were invited to click a link to "go to the main page"[1]. The sections with poems and translations that this link led to never made it into the archive, so nothing remains of the site's content beyond its description in directories.

The text was laid out in two columns — Russian and English — with a parallel translation of each phrase[1]. As the home page stated, "this page is always under construction," and "new poems are added every few weeks"[1]. At the top was a search field labeled "Find This:"[1]. Feedback was offered through a single listed contact — the mailbox allawatson@yahoo.com, which did not match the name given in the page's title[1]. The page gave neither an address nor a phone number: the site's connection to Nizhny Novgorod is known from the nn.ru directories[3][4].

In the nn.ru directories

The site was listed twice in the nn.ru directory, under different names. In the section "Society and People: Personal Pages of Nizhny Novgorod Residents" it was entered as "For women — poems, translations," dated 01/06/2000 with a rating score of 3.00[3]. In the section "Projects: Hobbies" it appeared as "POEMS," with the description "original poems and translations from German," dated 21/07/2000 with a score of 0.77[4]. In both entries the rating figure was a link to the statistics page Counter.nn.ru under number 955, meaning the site carried a Nizhny Novgorod hit counter[3][4].

The scale of these figures is clear from its neighbors in the same hobbies section: the page "Nizhny Novgorod Beer" showed 5.06, and a site about Gordon Shumway (Alf) showed 8.67, against 0.77 for the poetry page[4]. The site was not a notable resource; it is of interest as an ordinary representative of the layer for which the directory set up a separate section for personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents[3].

How it disappeared

The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated February 1, 2001; there are three snapshots in total, all taken within less than half a year[2]. Later the address stopped responding, and when checked for this census entry there was nothing left at it. The texts for which the page was created — original poems and translations from German — did not survive in any available snapshot: only the introductory screen survived, promising that new poems would be added every few weeks[1].

Records of pages like this were kept by the directory and the hit counter, and this entry has been reconstructed from their traces. For the broader picture of the era, see the overview of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet and the piece Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory: Society and People — Personal Pages of Nizhny Novgorod Residents, 2000 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory: Projects — Hobbies, 2001 (archive)