napyc.com was a Nizhny Novgorod website about outdoor activities and extreme sports that operated from 2000. As its home page stated, "The napyc.com project is about Outdoor Activities and Extreme Sports in Nizhny Novgorod: what, where, when, places, gear, people, shops, prices, classified ads, communication among kindred spirits"[1]. In December 2004 the site was listed among the entrants of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote in the "Best Independent Site" category[2]. In the second half of the 2000s the resource changed its topic: at the same address a blog about business and management appeared under the name "Active Business and Leisure in Nizhny"[3], with posts signed by Mikhail Trishin[4].

Extreme sports in Nizhny: what the site looked like

A snapshot from March 1, 2001 preserved the project's early appearance. The top menu consisted of five items: "News," "Winter Sports," "Shop," "Summer Sports," "Hangout." Separate sections covered downhill skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing, skateboarding, wakeboarding and kitesurfing, adjoined by pages titled "Nizhny Novgorod Paintball Center," "Paragliding," "Weather in Nizhny," and "Virtual Extreme" with simulator games. The footer carried a copyright notice from 2000[1].

The news feed of this snapshot spans late December 2000 to early January 2001 and consists entirely of local Nizhny Novgorod skiing practice. On December 20 there was a report on the opening of the season at the "Khabarskoye" ski resort and the start of operations at both slopes of Sluda — the "Sluda" Downhill Skiing Youth Sports School and the "Sluda" Downhill Skiing Club; on December 27 the schedule of "Khabarskoye" skiing days for the New Year holidays was published — "Saturday 12/30 a normal skiing day, Sunday 12/31 skiing until 12:00, 1/1 — a day off." A separate note promised a report on the New Year's celebration at the "Volzhanka" boarding house. The paragliding section posted manufacturers' price lists — MAI, ASA, "ParAAvis" — and "Virtual Extreme" featured a free snowboarding simulator that offered "the right to win a prize — a Burton board"[1].

The site's trading section operated as a classifieds board. In a prominent spot hung a "hot" ad for the sale of a universal ski-lift bail: "Hard duralumin. Brass pins on threads for lifts with right- and left-side cable placement. A 2.2-meter strap stitched at the attachment points," marked "Tested at Khabarskoye and at Sluda"; the email address trim@kis.ru and ICQ number 25478654 were given for contact[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the final tally of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, the "Active Outdoor Activities and Extreme Sports in Nizhny" site appears under number 135 in the "Best Independent Site" category; its rating columns show 4 votes by email and none by SMS. The top spot in the same category was held by another Nizhny Novgorod extreme-sports project — "Nizhny Novgorod Extreme Sports on the Internet" (extreme.nnov.ru) with 156 votes by email and one by SMS[2]. It was through these lists that napyc.com made it into our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, based on the Counter.nn.ru rating and Internet Day vote results.

"Active Business and Leisure": the topic change

By September 2007 napyc.com hosted a WordPress blog titled "Active Business and Leisure in Nizhny," with the sections "All Notes," "Your Own Business," "Management," "Process Approach"; the design was credited as "Adsense Ready Theme by Jason Golod." Extreme sports had not disappeared but moved to the background: at the bottom of the page a line read "To go to 'Active Outdoor Activities and Extreme Sports,' click the words 'Leisure in Nizhny' in the site logo image above," and the sidebar's "useful tools" still included a link "for virtual extreme sports," alongside links "to start Your Own Business," "for Consulting," "for generating Business Ideas," "for Advertising," and "for ISO 9000." The 2007 posts are devoted to managerial tools, the process approach, and entrepreneurship; one describes an online survey, "Work for Yourself or for the Boss?", which the author ran on a popular city forum — in the "Recruitment" and "Business Forum" sections. On August 25, 2007 the author apologized for outages: "Due to technical problems with hosting and a transition to a new database version (roughly from August 6 to 24), the site experienced temporary access disruptions, and text was seen displayed in the wrong encoding." A counter in the footer read: "RSS readers yesterday: 1"[3].

By 2012 the list of sections had grown to include "Franchising," "Motivation," and "QMS," two Subscribe.ru mailing lists appeared in the sidebar — "A Course of Anti-Crisis Strategies and Ways to Survive the Crisis" and "Franchising — Make Money Faster Than Your Competitors" — and the counter now showed 14 RSS readers per day. The latest posts by date relate to the 2008-2009 crisis: a free online course at inkrisis.ru, the book "Business and Crisis: 7 Steps to Successful Survival," the video seminar "Layoffs During a Crisis: Benefit from Them Without Breaking!," and the results of the online training "Strategies for Winning the Competitive Struggle," held on December 13, 2008[4].

Shutdown and the domain's fate

The blog's last post is dated August 26, 2009 — a note about the "Taiga" manufacturing franchise. After that the site stopped: snapshots from December 2014[5] and February 2016[6] show the same page as the 2012 snapshot, with the same archive of notes ending in August 2009[4].

By March 31, 2022 the Wayback Machine had preserved an entirely different resource at napyc.com — a corporate site of a Chinese packaging design company, with no trace of the previous content[7]. According to our survey, since 2023 the domain has served a parking page, and the last recorded Wayback Machine snapshot is dated February 22, 2024.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Domain page, 2022 (archive)