px-vtg-pushkinskoe.ru — the website of the "Pushkinskoye" subsidiary farm (PKh "Pushkinskoye"; the name recalls Pushkin), an agricultural enterprise from the Bolshoboldinsky District of the Nizhny Novgorod Region; the site named the village of Bolshoye Boldino as the district centre[1]. The home page described the farm's main line of work as meat and dairy production together with elite seed growing of grain crops, and, by the farm's own account, it had been engaged in elite seed growing since 1997[1]. The substantive snapshots of the home page that made it into our sample date from 2013–2014: the earliest was taken on 17 June 2013[1], the last on 18 December 2014[3]. According to the census record, the web archive's first request to the address is dated 15 October 2004, while the years of the site's life are put down as 1997–2014: the early boundary came from the 1997 copyright line noted in the record on the 2004 snapshot.

What the farm said about itself

Between June 2013 and December 2014 the text about the farm did not change by a single word — the three surviving snapshots coincide verbatim, differing only in the readings of the clock and the contents of the footer[1][3]. The farm gave its land areas right on the home page: a total area of agricultural land of 5,940 hectares, including 4,270 hectares of arable land, 1,217 hectares of pasture and 453 hectares of other land, plus hayfields[1].

As the home page reported, PKh "Pushkinskoye" was one of the largest agro-industrial enterprises in the region and the "strongest" of the seventeen agricultural enterprises operating in the district[1]. The visitor was met by an address signed by the farm's director N. P. Shkilev: "Dear Sirs! You are on the website of the subsidiary farm 'Pushkinskoye'" — there followed an invitation to learn what the farm was rich in, what production was being developed there and what its plans and programmes for the future were, and the address ended with a wish, set in capitals, of health, prosperity, success and optimism[1].

A separate paragraph carried a local-history introduction: the Boldino land is rich in remarkable people, the district is very picturesque, and the district centre has acquired wide renown thanks to the name of A. S. Pushkin[1].

How the site was arranged

The menu consisted of seven items: "Home", "About the farm", "Production", "For wholesalers", "Contacts", "Photo gallery", "Order"; below them stood the block "We are registered"[1]. A clock worked on the home page, displaying the current date and Moscow time, and next to it stood the line "Come to our site once again. Thank you!"[1][3]. There was also a heading "News", but the lead-in beneath it — the same paragraph about the Boldino land with a "more..." link — did not change from snapshot to snapshot[1][2][3].

Two menu items — "For wholesalers" and "Order" — show whom the site addressed first of all: not the casual visitor but the buyer of its produce[1]. What exactly the farm offered and at what prices is not visible from the surviving snapshots: the inner sections did not make it into our sample, and there were neither prices, nor a price list, nor contact telephone numbers on the home page[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site made it into our census through the lists of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day of 2004, yet no votes were recorded for it in the competition[5]. The address did not make it into the ratings data of Counter.nn.ru either — it has no rating position. This is the usual fate of a sector-specific corporate site in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of those years: such sites did not look for their audience among the city visitors counted by the counter. More on how the sample itself is put together can be found in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The link exchange and the fading out

In the snapshot of 17 June 2013, links in no way connected with the farm stood at the bottom of the home page: "Plastic surgery", "Laminated chipboard", and also the line "Corporate identity, creation and development of websites, order a website, corporate identity of a company"[1]. In the snapshot of 2 January 2014, PHP warnings about the deprecated set_magic_quotes_runtime function began to be printed over the page — two identical ones, from lines 302 and 308 of the file sape.php, which lay in the site's directory[2]. Judging by the file name, this was a link exchange script, and the extraneous links in the footer were the slots being sold.

By 18 December 2014 there were already four such warnings on the home page, the line about website development had disappeared from the footer, while the links to plastic surgery and laminated chipboard remained[3]. The errors hung in a conspicuous place all through 2014: barely twelve months passed between the two snapshots, and nobody removed them.

How it closed

There are no substantive snapshots in our sample after 18 December 2014[3]. The next saved request, on 20 September 2017, found a standard parking page on the domain: the domain name in a large line, a 2017 copyright, a notice that the advertisements placed above are served automatically by a third party and that neither the service provider nor the domain owner has any relation to the advertisers, and a link to a privacy policy[4]. In all, the web archive recorded ten requests to the address; in the census dossier the state of the domain is put down as "no domain" — all that is left of the website of the subsidiary farm "Pushkinskoye" are the archived snapshots.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, January 2014 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, December 2014 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Domain parking page, 2017 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)