stal-nn.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod company OOO "Stal-NN" ("Steel-NN"), a manufacturer of construction nails and furniture foam and a supplier of industrial cutting tools. The address was located in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru, and in the nn.ru directory the site was listed in the manufacturers section with the description "manufacture of construction nails, furniture foam"[1]. The company itself, as the home page stated, was "registered in 1994," that is, about eight years older than its website[1]. Snapshots of the home page in the web archive span the period from 2002 to 2013.

What the company did

The home page fit the entire profile of the enterprise into three short lists. Production: construction nails and furniture foam. Sales: "industrial saws (frame, circular, band, hacksaws, etc.)," industrial knives, spare parts for agricultural implements, sheet metal[1].

The third list — service — was more detailed than the others and revealed the company's specialization in servicing woodworking tools: repair of band saws (welding, sharpening, tooth setting); repair of carbide-tipped saws (re-brazing of tips, tooth sharpening, straightening and hammering of the saw blade); repair of circular saws (tooth re-cutting, sharpening and setting, straightening)[1]. Neither prices nor delivery terms were given on the home page.

How the site was structured

The menu consisted of five items: "About the Company," "News," "Products," "Services," "How to Find Us"[1]. Contact details and the address lived on a separate "How to Find Us" page, of which no snapshots are available to us — the home page itself had neither an address nor a phone number. No visitor counters or advertising banners appear in the preserved snapshot text.

The page was static and remained unchanged for years: the May 2004 and May 2005 snapshots are word for word identical, down to the footer notice "© 2001 OOO 'Stal-NN'" — meaning that by the time of the first preserved snapshots the site had already stood unchanged in that form for at least three years[1][2]. Below the copyright line was "Coding by Info-Online" — the only indication of who built it[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site belonged to the most numerous and most silent layer of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet — corporate calling-card sites of industrial firms that set up a page once and never returned to it. In the samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating preserved in our records, no traffic or ranking is recorded for stal-nn.r52.ru (for more on the sampling methodology, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). The site is also not listed in the preserved results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting[4]. The only surviving trace of its presence is a line in the nn.ru directory's category listing, which is how the site made it into our register.

How it closed

The last preserved snapshot is dated September 5, 2013, and it shows the site already changed. The production block had disappeared from the text: the phrase "the company is engaged in production: construction nails; furniture foam" is no longer on the page, leaving only tool sales and repair services[3]. The "News" and "Services" menu items had been removed from the markup — only traces of disabled code fragments remain of them, while "About the Company," "Products," and "How to Find Us" survived[3]. At the same time the copyright line was updated to "© 2013": someone touched the page for the last time by trimming its content rather than expanding it[3].

After this snapshot no further traces of the site remain: the domain stal-nn.r52.ru did not exist at the time of our survey. Over eleven years of observation, the web archive accessed the address seventeen times — the rarity of these visits itself suggests that almost no one came to the page.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting, 2004 (archive)