autostop.nnov.ru was the site of "Autostop," a Nizhny Novgorod automobile newspaper. The home page's title read "Autostop — Nizhny Novgorod Automobile Newspaper"[2], and at the bottom of the page ran a line stating, as the home page reported, that "the internet version of 'Autostop' has been running since 11.11.2000"[2]. Web Archive snapshots of the home page begin on 12 October 1999[1] and end in December 2008[6]. The publication was part of that Nizhny Novgorod Internet in which a print newspaper set up a web version for itself and stopped there.

A ring of links instead of a site (1999)

The earliest snapshot, from 12 October 1999, caught an almost empty page at the address. It contained only the caption "АВТОSTOP" and a "Nizhny Novgorod ring of links" block with three links — "previous," "next," "random"[1]. No menu, no content, no masthead information: at that point the address existed as a link in the mutual cross-linking of Nizhny Novgorod sites rather than as a publication.

A newspaper online: menu, archive, partner

By November 2000 the address had grown into a full-fledged online version of the newspaper. The home page's horizontal menu listed the sections: "About the project," "News," "Big people," "Nuts and bolts," "Answering machine," "Jokes," "Tests," "For advertisers," "Advertisers," "Links"[4]. Two neighboring items about advertising — terms for future advertisers and a list of existing ones — are a telling detail: the newspaper evidently lived on advertising from car dealerships and repair shops. Below that sat a "Search the site" field[4].

The left column held an archive of issues, arranged by publication date: November 2000 — the 4th, 11th, 21st, and 28th, December — the 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th; then the year 2001 from January through December[2]. The archive listed thirty-seven issues in total. Its rhythm reads unevenly: from January through June 2001 issues came out roughly once a week, then after 4 July the next one is dated 22 August, and between 26 September and 19 December there are no issues in the archive at all[2].

Above the menu ran a line about a partnership: "OUR PARTNER — THE AUTOMOBILE INTERNET PROJECT 'NIZHNY NOVGOROD — THE RUSSIAN DETROIT'"[4]. No visitor counters of its own are visible on the surviving home-page snapshots.

The issue on which everything stopped

The "Latest issue" block on the home page was captioned "No. 44 (236), 26.12.2001"[2] — the forty-fourth issue of the year and the two hundred and thirty-sixth overall. That same issue was still the "latest" in the snapshot from 1 February 2006[3], and in the snapshot from 9 January 2008[4]. In other words, the site was updated for a little over a year and after 26 December 2001 never changed again — for seven more years the home page kept showing the pre-New-Year issue.

The teasers for that issue survive in full and offer a slice of early-2000s automobile subject matter. "Aryans against a samurai" — a comparison of the Subaru Impreza WRX, "priced at only $24,520," with "luxury Audis and BMWs — each priced at more than $40,000"[2]. "The head of it all" — about mechanics who, when repairing engines, "'forget' about cylinder heads"[2]. "Interchangeability of piston rings" — about how "repairing foreign-make engines is often hampered by a lack of the needed parts"[2]. "The secrets of 'OFF ROAD'" — a look at off-road vehicle transmissions[2].

Alongside the technical material, the issue included an interview featured on the home page under the headline "Gennady Khodyrev: 'I am satisfied with the people who work with me.'" The teaser, as the home page reported, quoted him as saying: "Compared with others, the Nizhny Novgorod region really does look modest. For comparison: the Samara province, our equal, has a budget of more than 26 billion rubles, twice the size of ours"[2]. The same piece pushed back on a common formula: "It has too often been said that 'Nizhny Novgorod is the third capital, one of the leaders.' That did not entirely reflect the real state of affairs"[2].

The editorial column "What are we on about?" dates the issue itself: the author wishes his fellow countrymen luck as they, "not yet having recovered from the drawn-out gubernatorial elections, are getting ready for the mayoral ones," and separately wishes drivers the customary "no nails, no traffic wand," "an easy inspection," and "a killer spark"[2].

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

"Autostop" remained a publication without any notable online weight. The results table for the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote does not mention the domain autostop.nnov.ru or the name "Autostop" at all[5]. It also does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru ranking; the address is known from the nn.ru directory's category listing — see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. This is the ordinary fate of a "web supplement" to a print newspaper: the audience stayed with the print edition, while the site served as a shopfront.

How it closed down

Its decline is visible in the technical traces. The page was assembled in PHP — from the files index.phtml and nav.phtml — and pulled in an external banner block via a request to http://w3.INFORIS.ru/cgi-common/bsh?…[3]. By 1 February 2006 that address no longer resolved to an IP, and instead of banners the home page printed interpreter warnings: "php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known"[3]. The errors also gave away an internal server path — /sites/wwastop/[3]; by January 2008 the site was living at a different path, /home/autostop.nnov.ru/[4], meaning that in the interim it had been moved from host to host without its content being touched.

The last Web Archive snapshot of the home page is dated 28 December 2008[6]. Thus the site's substantive life fit into thirteen months — from 11 November 2000 to 26 December 2001 — after which it stood unchanged for seven more years, losing its banners and changing servers along the way, until it disappeared for good.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 1999 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2008 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, last snapshot, December 2008 (archive)