Ted's Fun Site

Ted's Fun Site was the first personal web site made by Ted Phillips in late March 1998. Like its successor the Thingamabob.com2 web site, Ted's Fun Site hosted a number of Cracked Egg Studios properties during its time. It was renamed "Ted's Web Site" a few months later, although the former name is more-often used to reference the site.

History

In March 1998, Ted's father John Phillips opened his own web site dedicated to his life's artwork and animations he was creating using the brand new GIF format. His site was a homestead in one of the internet's first Metaverse communities, in the original GeoCities, where web sites were arranged as plots of land in various neighborhoods. Like other GeoCities sites at the time, it could be accessed by navigating the community's map or street view, or by accessing the URL directly. Shortly after reserving his own plot, John helped Ted reserve one too. Ted reserved cottage #8925 in the Enchanted Forest on March 19, 1998.[1] Using the browser's address bar, the web site was accessible at http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Cottage/8925.

Ted built his web site using Print Shop Presswriter and launched Ted's Fun Site March 22 and April 2, 1998.[2]



In June 1998, Ted began updating the web site to 3D with the help of a program called Bryce 3D, which he had planned to use for video game development, and using a new language called VRML that let web developers create 3D worlds that browsers could walk through. Over the next several months, the web site was rebranded to "Ted's Web Site" and updated with a new home page. The site was completely reorganized, removing much of the previous movie-related content, and adding new sections related to Ted's computer and game programming efforts. However, the 3D conversion of Ted's Fun Site was never completed.

In 1999, development on Ted's Fun Site came to a halt as Ted lost access to his AOL account and did not have internet access for about a year thereafter.

In fall 2000, Ted opened a new AOL account and focused his energy on developing the Thingamabob.com2 site, which would soon house most of the same content. By this time, Ted had forgotten the address of Ted's Fun Site, as well as his original GeoCities username and password, and since he no longer had access to his old email address, he could not recover any of that information. The web site had supposedly been backed up on a series of 3.5" floppy disks, but the data on one of the disks was already corrupt and unreadable.

By 2005, studio veterans had all but forgotten that Ted's Fun Site once existed. When the Cracked Egg Studios web site launched on May 29, 2005, the news article mistakenly attributed Thingamabob.com2 as having been the first site to host its content:
Cracked Egg Studios finally has its own web site! Since the very first Thingamabob.com2, we have all waited for this great day.

In 2009, Yahoo deleted all GeoCities content, including Ted's Fun Site. Archive.org's Wayback Machine had never indexed the site. An organization called Archive Team attempted to save all existing GeoCities web pages for posterity, but Ted's Fun Site was not among the sites rescued.

By 2022, the data on the remaining backup floppy disks was no longer readable. However, Nick Phillips still had copies of files for about one third of the site that he had saved on a hard disk in 2007. In April 2022, Ted Phillips used data recovery techniques in order to recover another one third of the web site from the corrupt floppy disks. In March 2024, analysis of the surviving data recovered a partial script for Y3K, but revealed the backups were only of the launch version of the web site, before any updates were made.

On March 19, 2024, exactly 26 years from its inception, an interactive recreation of Ted's Fun Site was released on the Cracked Egg Studios web site, using its new sub-site functionality.

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