blake.newmail.ru ("William Blake — Life and Work") was a personal website about the English poet, artist and engraver William Blake, which existed from 2000 to 2003. Its subject had nothing to do with Nizhny Novgorod; it ended up in the Nizhny Novgorod internet by way of registration: the address was listed in the regional counter Counter.nn.ru[3] and stood in the nn.ru directory — the "catalogue of Nizhny Novgorod websites" — in the "Projects : Hobbies" section[6]. In the counter's statistics the site appeared as "William Blake — Life and Work"[3], and in the catalogue as "WIliam Blake", with a typo in the first word[6].

What was at the address

The project had no domain of its own: it lived on a third-level name in the newmail.ru zone[1]. The early home page was assembled out of frames, and from it the web archive preserved, in the capture of 2 March 2001, only the title "William Blake - William Blake" and a line for those whose browsers did not support frames: "You are viewing this page with a browser that does not support frames"[1]. What was inside the frames has to be judged from the service fields of the same page: the description read "A Russian resource devoted to the life and work of William Blake (1757-1827) - the English poet, artist and mystic", and the keywords were "poetry, graphic art, engraving, artist, poet, mystic"[1]. The catalogue card described the site more briefly: "A personal page about William Blake"[6]; the counter — "A page devoted to W. Blake - the English poet, artist and mystic"[4].

The capture of 5 August 2003 found the home page already in a readable form. It carried the line "This site is devoted to the work of William Blake - the English poet, artist, mystic and engraver", the warning "This page is optimised for a resolution of 800x600 and above", the link "Add to Favourites" and the service line "Date of last update - 10 June 2003"[2]. That update date is the last evidence that anyone was still tending the site.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The earliest trace of the address is not in the web archive of the page itself but in the statistics of the Nizhny Novgorod counter: on 30 September 2000 "William Blake — Life and Work" stood on line 315 of the overall counter.nn.ru rating, with 250 in the "Counter" column, 2.69 in the "Rating" column and 1 in the "Hits" column[3]. In the "Personalities" section of the same rating the site held 50th place[4]. That measurement is half a year older than the earliest preserved capture of the page[1].

In the nn.ru directory the page's rating changed noticeably over the course of 2002: 3.78 in the capture of 25 April[5], 2.4 in the capture of 3 June — the site then stood on line 21 out of the 25 on the first page of the section[6], and 15 in the capture of 25 July, where, sorted by rating, it rose to 12th place out of the 25 on the first page of "Projects : Hobbies" — between a site about Nizhny Novgorod beer and a page called "Contact with a UFO"[7]. For its neighbours in the section this was the middle of the list: the top lines of the same page were held by "The Healer's Page" with a rating of 3439 and "The City Forum" with 922[7].

The address has no votes at the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[10]: by the time of the contest the site was no longer working. How the visibility of such pages is measured and where the figures come from is set out in the piece Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating; for the general context of the era see Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

The capture of 5 August 2003 is the last one in which the address holds the site about Blake[2]. In the capture of 17 August 2005 the content there is already someone else's: a list of pharmacy and advertising links with a reprint of a page from the American medical reference MedlinePlus about weight loss on top of it[8]. The last capture of the address in the web archive is dated 22 March 2008; by that point the page title was "pills online pharmacy" and the text consisted of a list of drug names[9]. In all, the web archive index holds 36 captures of the address.

The check made while this inventory was being compiled no longer found the address alive: blake.newmail.ru does not respond. What is left of the site is two lines of text, a set of keywords, the date of the last update and a few figures in Nizhny Novgorod ratings — everything the web archive managed to take from a page hidden behind frames.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Overall counter.nn.ru rating, 30 September 2000 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rating, "Personalities" section, 30 September 2000 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Projects : Hobbies" section, 25 April 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Projects : Hobbies" section, 3 June 2002 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Projects : Hobbies" section, 25 July 2002 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — Last capture of the address, 2008 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)