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, one surviving database, and the Wayback Machine.
Hand-built pages, a splash screen with an ENTER button, and a comic-book alter ego. There was a mail-order store (chezDEPOT, powered by Miva), a snack-review section called Twinkie Break!, QuickTime VR backstage tours, and a news page Steve typed straight into — in Comic Sans, naturally. The domain magicsuperhero.com was registered for the comic book.
“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
The comic book was real. Announced for Spring 2002 with its own domain, magicsuperhero.com — which is still parked on this very hosting account today.
All-American Rock Illusionist. Spandex, cape, and a mirror-ball guitar. The Chezababes danced, the van racked up miles, and the show played fairs and theaters across the Midwest.
The News page mascot. This illustration sat beside every hand-typed update from 2003 and 2004 — Mom's hospital scares, movie reviews, Mayor Pradel's bedside visit, and Halloween as Steve Perry.
Before the surviving blog, Steve ran three earlier community platforms on chezaday.com. Their PHP shells are still sitting in the /OLD folder of the server, byte-for-byte intact — but the databases that held the actual posts and conversations were dropped somewhere along two decades of server moves. The Internet Archive never crawled any of them. What was said there is unrecoverable.
Phorum 3.x (.php3 era) · c.2000–2003
A full message board for fans of the show. 90 program files survive, right down to the ban lists and the navy-and-khaki color scheme in its config.
Its database, phorumChezaday, lived on milli.gogga.com — a hosting company from a life before this server. That machine is long gone, and the conversations went with it.
Wayback Machine captures of /phorum: 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 “blog.” All 108 files survive, config intact, pointing at database chezaday_com_-_blog.
That database was dropped. Even the cached RSS file is empty — it still contains b2's stock “this file is blank” placeholder text.
Wayback Machine captures of /blog: ONE 301 REDIRECT · Database: DROPPED
Lifli iBlog, published from Steve's iMac · 2005
A Mac desktop app that uploaded a blog as folders of HTML. What's left is the eeriest artifact in the room: a perfect, completely empty directory skeleton — three entry IDs stamped June 27 and July 8, 2005, with every file inside them gone.
July 8, 2005 is the same day the surviving WordPress blog said good-bye to Rocky.
Wayback Machine captures of /iblog: ZERO · Files on disk: 0 BYTES
Static files ride along when a site is copied from server to server — they've survived at least two hosting migrations untouched since 2004. Databases have to be exported and imported deliberately, and abandoned ones get cleaned up. The three databases above missed a boat sometime in the last twenty years.
The lesson of this room is the reason the rest of this exhibit exists: the fourth database — the 2005 WordPress one — did survive, and every word of it has now been preserved. Next stop.
In January 2005 Steve moved his journal into a young piece of software called WordPress and wrote steadily for six years. This is the one era whose database made it to 2026 intact — 171 published posts, about 58,800 words — a diary of road trips, magic conventions, hospital waiting rooms, two German Shepherds, and every show in between. The excerpts below are verbatim.
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?”
Thursday, May 12th, 2005
“The magic world has suffered a great loss. The Dean of the Society of American Magicians, Jay Marshall passed away on Tuesday. Jay was actually a good friend of mine .. always with advice ... and a joke or two... I thought that I needed to do something special for him ... so I went in the shop and made him his last wand. This is what we magicians call .. the Broken Wand.”
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.”
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
“I decided to go into the city to visit a couple of the few remaining ‘brick and mortar’ magic shops... Our first stop was Magic Inc. on Lincoln Ave... Years ago you would find Jay Marshall roaming just behind the counter. I've been coming here since I was a kid. It's still a thrill to see all the ‘stuff’ on the shelves, the walls .. and even the ceiling!”
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
“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.”
Around 2012 the site grew up: a business-first rebuild as 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.
The blog came along for the ride. Its first post in the new home picks up exactly where the old era left off:
“Yikes … Some Time Has Passed! As you might have noticed, we have an all-new website. My buddy Greg really streamlined things and brought it up…”
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.
Visit the live site — chezaday.com
Booking the Magic Superhero himself: 630.579.9409 · steve@chezaday.com
