One domain. Twenty-seven years. Steve Chezaday — Naperville's All-American Rock Illusionist — has kept chezaday.com running since 1999, rebuilding it on whatever the web was excited about at the time. Everything below was recovered from the server's own files, two surviving databases, and the Wayback Machine — and nothing was invented: where the record is gone, this exhibit says so.
Hand-built pages, a splash screen with an ENTER button, and a comic-book alter ego. A mail-order store (chezDEPOT, powered by Miva), a snack-review kids' zone called Twinkie Break!, QuickTime VR backstage tours, RealPlayer video of two Bozo Show appearances, and a news page Steve typed straight into — in Comic Sans, naturally. This is the richest surviving era: the whole thing is still on the server, and its biggest rooms are open below.
“On a sadder note we lost a fellow magician a few days ago... Ralph Beck. He was well known in the Chicago area... Terry called with the news and asked if I would make the special wand for the ceremony.. known as the ‘broken wand’. Its a tradition when a magician passes, that the ‘spell is broken’ and the wand is snapped in half... To me it's an honor that I can do something special for a fellow magician and hand-craft this special wand as one last symbol of his magical life.”
— Steve · 91 more entries in the News wing
Each wing below is rebuilt from the original files with the original graphics — and the impossible formats (Flash, RealPlayer, QuickTime VR) converted so they work again.
The ShowSix illusions, the client list, real fan letters on real letterheads, the Super Friends crew page — and the final tour dates, summer 2012.ENTER THE WING →
The News Page91 hand-typed entries, 2003–2005, verbatim: road stories, broken wands, Mom's hospital scares and one very haunted hotel.ENTER THE WING →
The Media VaultBozo '92 and '97, Wild Chicago, the 2003 promo film — all converted from RealPlayer. Plus the QuickTime VR rooms, resurrected.ENTER THE WING →
The Web GalleryAll 421 photos, all 15 albums: Abbott's, Kane County, Santa's Village, the illusions and the Chezababes.ENTER THE WING →
Twinkie Break!The kids' zone. Take the actual 2003 Flash Chez-a-Quiz — the original .swf, playing again in an emulator.ENTER THE WING →
chezDEPOTThe merch table: autographed photos, Illusion Crew shirts and the 1991 tour book. Sold out for twenty years and counting.ENTER THE WING →
Contact & Fan ClubBooking info (the number still works), and the gloriously self-aware final fan-club page.ENTER THE WING →Before the surviving blog, three earlier community platforms ran on chezaday.com. Their software shells are still in the server's /OLD folder, byte-for-byte intact — but the databases that held the actual posts and conversations were lost across two decades of server moves, and the Internet Archive never crawled any of them. What was said there is unrecoverable, so this exhibit doesn't pretend otherwise: no fake stops, no reconstructed quotes.
Phorum 3.x (.php3 era) · c.2000–2003
A full fan message board. 90 program files survive, down to the ban lists. Its database, phorumChezaday, lived on milli.gogga.com — a hosting company from a life before this server, long gone.
Wayback captures: ZERO · database: NEVER ON THIS SERVER
b2/cafelog 0.6.x · c.2003–2004
Steve was blogging on b2 — the software WordPress was forked from — before most people had heard the word. All 108 files survive, config intact, pointing at database chezaday_com_-_blog. That database was dropped; even the cached RSS file still holds b2's stock placeholder text.
Wayback captures: ONE 301 · database: DROPPED
Lifli iBlog, published from the iMac · 2005
A Mac desktop app that uploaded a blog as folders of HTML. What's left is a perfect, completely empty directory skeleton — three entry IDs stamped June 27 and July 8, 2005, every file inside them gone. July 8, 2005 is the day the surviving blog said good-bye to Rocky.
Wayback captures: ZERO · files on disk: 0 BYTES
Also found nearly empty in this room: the fan-club mailing list database survives with zero subscribers left in it, the WebCalendar tour-dates database survives with zero events, and the surviving blog's 349 stored comments are all spam — not one real reader comment made it through. Static files ride along when a site is copied between servers; databases have to be carried deliberately. That's the lesson of this room, and the reason the next stop exists: the fourth database did survive, and every word of it is now preserved.
In January 2005 Steve moved his journal into a young piece of software called WordPress and wrote steadily for six and a half years: 171 posts, about 58,800 words — road trips, magic conventions, hospital waiting rooms, two German Shepherds, and every show in between. The real theme header below is from the server; the excerpts are verbatim; and this rebuild renders every post in full, with 129 recovered photos.
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 — the first post
“We had a fun visit and broke out the old magic videos ... the memories came rushing back... I really got a kick out of her little boy .. he's three and full of energy. I brought him the old can of snakes trick ... you know .. where the snakes pop out. Well he really enjoyed that ... over and over again. I know if I'm ever lucky enough to have kids ... they'll be pretty messed up with a dad like me ... but in a good, messed up kinda way .. right?”
Friday, July 8th, 2005
“Let me tell you a story about a boy and his dog ... it has a very sad ending though ... Yesterday I had to let go of my best buddy, Rocky... I brought him to the park one last time and asked God to take care of my puppy while we're apart.”
Monday, November 1st, 2010 — the beginning of the end
“Yes, it's been forever since I wrote .. I have no excuses... If you haven't already found me on facebook please do so. I'm on there way too much .. and I share my random thoughts with almost 1400 friends on there. Just look up my name and add me as a friend. As long as you're not some crazy nut-job ... I'll ‘friend’ you.”
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 — the final post of the era
“The following week we ran into Weird Al Yankovic right here in Naperville. He was in town for a book signing .. and we snapped a photo. That's one more thing I can cross off my ‘bucket-list.’ ... Of course I couldn't have done it without Carol packing things up behind the curtain .. during the show. We pulled it off ... and it was back to work the next day.”
In early 2012 the site grew up. The superhero frames site was moved into a folder called /OLD — where it still sits — and a modern business site took over the domain: services, FAQs, a portfolio, tour dates. The old blog came along for the ride, imported wholesale into the new database… where it received exactly one more post.
services — 6 entries, first dated Jan 26, 2012faqs — 10 entries, Feb 2012portfolio — 12 entries, from Feb 2012staff — 8 entries, June 2012 (the crew page, reborn)“As you might have noticed, we have an all-new website. My buddy Greg really streamlined things and brought it up to date. It's been some time since I sat down and wrote my thoughts. Most of my recent adventures can be seen in small snippets on Facebook ... it seems to be what everyone is doing these days. I'm not even sure if I'm in the right section here on my website ... but, we'll see if this works. Looks like my last entry was almost three years ago ... if you can believe that!”
Every era of this site — 1999, 2005, 2012 — carries the same credit in its source: designed and maintained by Presto Productions. This exhibit is the fourth thing Presto has built on the domain.
The 2012 relaunch, refreshed over the years, is still the live site: Chezaday — Naperville Magician & Illusionist. Family events, fairs and festivals, strolling magic, school shows, grand illusion — and face painting by Carol, the same Carol packing the show behind the curtain in the final chezaBLOG post of 2011.
The time machine ends where the story is still being written. If you got here because you actually need a magician:
Visit the live site — chezaday.com
Booking the Magic Superhero himself: 630.579.9409 · steve@chezaday.com
