stown.sinn.ru was the website of the music project Sleepy Town Manufacture, hosted by a Nizhny Novgorod host on a third-level domain of the sinn.ru zone[3]. The nn.ru directory of Nizhny Novgorod websites listed it under the "Projects: Music" category and described it in one line: "Website of the group Sleepy Town / electronic music idm, ambient"[2]. The Wayback Machine's index holds 53 snapshots of the address, the earliest from April 12, 2001[7]. The site's own text survives only in the snapshot from October 11, 2006, and by then it is already a farewell note giving a new address[1]. The last snapshot, from October 1, 2023, shows the hosting provider's service placeholder page[5].

What the home page looked like

The only surviving snapshot of the site's own page is short, a few lines, typed in lowercase English. As the home page stated, the name "sleepy town manufacture" stood at the top, below it "coming sun. switch to www.stown.org pls" (as in the original) and "available only guestbook"; the contact given was the address stown@stown.org[1]. There is no menu, no sections, and no visit counters in this snapshot: by October 2006 all that remained of the site at the Nizhny Novgorod address was a guestbook and a request to move to the stown.org domain[1].

What the site looked like before that, the snapshots available to us do not show. The content of the early versions can be judged only from the nn.ru directory line, where the address was listed as the site of a group playing electronic music in the idm and ambient genres[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the snapshot of the "Projects: Music" category of the Nizhny Novgorod directory from April 25, 2002, a rating of 1.83 stands next to the name[2] — the Counter.nn.ru figure by which the directory ranked sites within the category. The nearest neighbors on the list were "MPEG World" with a rating of 1.84 and "Official website of the duo Double Project" with 1.65, while the category was headed by "Studio Beaumonde" with 859.94 and "Music Archive in Nizhny Novgorod" with 619.34[2]. By this measure the site stood at the very bottom edge of the music category of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet: the gap between it and the category leader is a factor of hundreds. How the counter worked and what its numbers meant is examined in the piece Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The category itself was large and varied: it included an online store with delivery in Nizhny Novgorod, an archive of Russian music, a page about Nizhny Novgorod musicians, and the websites of individual bands and DJs[2]. The site does not appear in the surviving list of voting results from the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[6].

Move and closure

Judging by the 2006 snapshot, the project itself moved the site away from the Nizhny Novgorod address to its own domain, stown.org, leaving a note and a guestbook at the old location[1]. What became of the new address, our materials do not show.

By 2016 the address had been taken off the server. The snapshot from April 11, 2016 returns the hosting provider's service page: "The address you requested, www.stown.sinn.ru, does not exist on the server. You may have mistyped the address"[3]. The same placeholder page appears in the snapshots from October 4, 2022[4] and October 1, 2023[5].

The placeholder page lists round-the-clock technical support at +7(8314)30-30-94, directs hosting inquiries to webmaster@mts-nn.ru, and offers a link to the home page of OJSC "VolgaTelecom"[3]. Thus, by that time the hosting facility where the site had lived was serviced by that operator. The last snapshot of the address in the Wayback Machine is dated October 1, 2023; by then the address had had no content of its own for seventeen years[5].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archived)
  2. web.archive.org — 'Projects: Music' category of the nn.ru directory, 2002 (archived)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archived)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archived)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2023 (archived)
  6. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archived)
  7. web.archive.org — Index of stown.sinn.ru snapshots in the Wayback Machine (archived)