alex852.narod.ru is a personal home page called "Useful Page," listed in the directory of the Nizhny Novgorod portal nn.ru (the /rub/ section). Its content consisted of homemade JavaScript scripts: a calendar for any year, a "clock" showing system time, a clickable map, a collection of links, and a decoder for recoding text between koi, iso and win encodings[1]. According to the web archive index, the page sat at its address for twenty-four years — the first snapshot is dated 5 January 2002, the last 24 January 2026 — although the author stopped updating it as early as autumn 2002[1].

What was on the page

The menu consisted of five sections — "Calendar," "Clock," "ClickAll!," "My Links," "About Me" — and a block of counters labeled "~Counters"[1]. The main feature was the calendar: according to the author's description, it was built in JavaScript and could calculate any year, including the Old Style calendar and dates BC, with the year entered in a text field; as a sample question, it invited the visitor to find out what day of the week 8 January 2317 would fall on[1]. "Clock" collected examples of "live" pages showing system time in various browsers; "ClickAll!" was a large image map inviting a random click; "My Links" was a collection of links the author promised to keep expanding; "About Me" held information about the author, accompanied by the decoder (koi, iso, win)[1].

At the bottom was the line "Tested by Opera 5.11; MSIE 5.5; NN 6.01" — a list of the browsers in which the author had tested the scripts — along with an invitation to write in about bugs and suggestions[1]. The author's name is not given in the saved snapshots of the home page, and the separate "About Me" page did not make it into the archived sample; no address, phone number, or mention of a city appears on the home page in any snapshot[1][3].

Two months of news

The "News" block on the home page consists of three entries, all from 2002: on 27 July the author added four links to "My Links" and fixed a bug in the decoder (the letter "б" was not being recoded), apologizing for the delay; on 10 August the koi-8 versions of the pages were removed, five more links were added, and a link-exchange page was set up; on 20 September seven links were added to "My Links"[1]. The September entry remained the last one. The snapshots from 3 November 2018, 14 June 2022, and 17 November 2025 show exactly the same text with the same three news items[1][2][3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the nn.ru directory, the site was described in almost the same words as on its own home page — through the calendar for any year, the JavaScript clock, and the large "ClickAll!" map; the directory entry carried a rating of 15 and zero votes. For the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s, this was an ordinary-looking home page: a third-level address in the narod.ru zone, a set of JavaScript exercises, and a line in the city directory.

Fate of the address

The site was never moved to another address — it simply stopped being updated and stayed where it was. In the 2018, 2022, and 2025 snapshots, the line "Site built with uCoz" appears at the bottom of the page, while the rest of the text remains exactly as it was by September 2002[1][3]. The most recent web archive snapshot is dated 24 January 2026. As of a check in August 2026, the site was still responding at this address. The calendar that promised to answer what day of the week 8 January 2317 would fall on has outlived its author-updater by more than twenty years.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 3 November 2018 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 14 June 2022 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 17 November 2025 (archive)