The MajikWidget Blog

Tips to make money blogging

2008-04-02T21:03:00.002-04:00

A new section has been added to the site to help blog owners and webmasters in general increase the profits.

You are welcomed to browse through these useful money making tips

System Problems have been fixed

2008-03-15T12:50:00.002-04:00

Our increase in membership and usage required additional resources and tweaking of our server configurations. We apologize for the experienced services interruptions, but we are confident with the changes made that we can ensure 100% uptime for our widgets.

Thank you for your patience.

The Widget Master

New Widgets and information for 2008

2007-12-28T12:23:00.000-05:00

Great news!

We have secured new funding and during the first semester of 2008 we will be developing 6 new widgets and adding a new information section with topics related to Blogging, generating revenue online, and the internet in general. This is a great time to send those new widget ideas. Best Wishes for 2008.

The Google OpenSocial Initiative

2007-11-01T15:49:00.001-04:00

MySpace and Six Apart (among others) announced today that it will joining Google's OpenSocial initiative. This is great news for the future of MajikWidget and our ability to grow and scale.

Stay tuned for more announcements as we follow the OpenSocial initiative closely.

We want your opinion...

2007-07-04T23:06:00.001-04:00

It's been a while since we've updated everyone and for obvious reasons. If you recall our last post we discussed the fact that we have been keeping our service stable and building clients. This has been a successful and conservative course.

To that end we are ready to start looking at some major upgrades and changes over the next few months. We'd like to get some of your feedback.

Please take our survey and let us know your thoughts...

Click Here to take survey

We'll update everyone on the results in the next few weeks. Thanks!

[NOTICE] Infrastructure Upgrade

2007-05-01T09:47:00.000-04:00

We are about to undergo a major hardware infrastructure change and upgrade.

Over the past several months we have been aware of intermittent connectivity issues related to various accounts and widget performance. We have invested considerable money and time to insure that the MajikWidget infrastructure performs well under the strain that our user base generates.

To this end we are pro-actively addressing these recent issues. In order to achieve this we need to make everyone aware of our transition process.

We will temporarily disable new account registrations starting Sunday, May 6, 2007.

Complete user account access will be suspended for 24 hours on Monday May 7, 2007.

Changes and upgrades to service will be performed on Monday, May 7, 2007.

Complete registration and account access will be re-instated on Tuesday, May 8, 2007.

Interruption of existing widget service (if any) would be considered extremely unlikely. During the transition, you may find that a few of your voting or star ranking widgets will allow individual users to vote more than once. This is typically prevented in our normal operation. This will be an issue because of the migration of our security database and expected domain propagation issues. This issue will correct itself very quickly.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us a support@majikwidget.com.

MajikWidget Update

2007-02-19T10:49:00.000-05:00

I'd like to take a moment to address some recent concerns about MajikWidget.

It has been pointed out that there have been no major upgrades or apparent movement in the last six months. In fact, some have suggested that we should be added to the TechCrunch Deadpool. That suggestion would actually be funny except for the fact that TechCrunch has never acknowledged that we exist in the first place. I'm sure this is a slight oversight on Mr. Arrington's part.

Our future and fate is dependent upon the loyalty and happiness of our customers. We have made a conscious effort to grow MajikWidget from the stand point of quality product and service. This strategy has worked as we've experienced a remarkable growth in our user base due to word of mouth and our virtually non-existent marketing efforts (using the powered by link on all widgets). All of our customers are typically extremely happy with the operation of our product and the timeliness of our support team.

But alas we are not without growing pains. MajikWidget is privately funded and considers itself a bootstrap operation. We have invested a considerable amount of dollars into hardware infrastructure and support capabilities. This was to insure the execution of our quality product and service strategy. We have had tremendous support from our user base as well as our great friend Guy Kawasaki. Who incidentally is not an investor in MajikWidget but a happy customer and friend.

We admit that we could be more active with the MajikWidget blog. It is necessary to communicate with everyone about what is happening. We are making every attempt to do this when we feel there is relevant news and information to publish. The fact of the matter is there really has not been much relevant news or information about MajikWidget in the last six months.

It is not our plan to close MajikWidget or enter anyones dead pool any time soon. We are not hurting financially nor or we failing to progress forward. In fact, as stated before, the user base is growing at a very steady rate each day and our plan (for the moment) is to keep up with the demands that this growth puts on our service.

To accomplish this we need to create a positive revenue stream from our current products and services because of our bootstrap operation. If there are any investors out there that may wish to change this particular strategy, we are all ears.

That said, we thank each and everyone of our users for their continued support and patronage. We are not going anywhere and look forward to providing quality products and services for years to come.

P.S., If you know Michael Arrington perhaps you can let him know that we do exist.

MajikWidget - Global Domination

2006-11-18T08:35:00.000-05:00

Wow, what a great quarter! Thought we'd share the world map overlay from Google Analytics with everyone. MajikWidget is headed for global widget domination. Thank you everyone!

MajikWidget Continues to Grow

2006-11-09T14:54:00.000-05:00

The word is out and MajikWidget continues to grow at an impressive rate. This growth has not been without its ups and downs. Over the last two or three weeks you may have experienced a few hiccups with your widgets. The MajikWidget community has grown large enough now that it was taxing our server cluster pretty hard. We've made some software adjustments and everything is running smoothly again.

In addition, we've reached a milestone in the number of users in the MajikWidget community to date. We sincerely thank all of you who continue to use our service and welcome our numerous new members each day. It's simply awesome and we appreciate all the positive feedback and support.

The next few months should be business as usual as we are working on our future widget roadmap. Through the American holiday season you'll see some interesting partnerships coming online that will benefit the entire community as well.

This is an exciting time for MajikWidget as we prepare for a stellar 2007. Our work in the corporate and enterprise arena is helping us establish the framework for expanding the company in many different ways. Stay tuned for more information on that side of the business. As usual, we are hoping to update everyone more frequently via our blog. Our dedication to the technology, model and operations has trumped our ability to be great communicators recently.

Introducing MajikWidget 2.0!

2006-08-07T11:15:00.000-04:00

We are pleased to welcome everyone to our newly renovated MajikWidget website and control panel. I think you will all agree that it was worth the wait. This new user experience has been a priority to us not just for aesthetics but for back end operations as well.

It is paramount to us that the customer experience be exceptional as we continue our exciting growth. This new renovation will allow us to streamline widget development and start working toward our goal of releasing a new useful widget every week.

There are still a few things to fine tune but for the most part we are in a great position. MajikWidget is pulling down about 20Gb worth of bandwidth a month right now and we are doubling our registration numbers every two weeks.

The new user control panel now includes the ability to edit previously created widgets. This is a huge step forward since many of you have voiced the need to correct typos in your poll widgets. This feature not only allows for these corrections quickly but enables you to get the most value out of all individual widgets.

The new widget browser is a central part of the control panel. With it you can quickly locate new widgets from our library. As we grow there are plans to integrate an alphabetical "quick jump" for easily locating your favorite widgets (thanks John, we hear ya!).

We've also added three new widgets. By popular demand you can now dynamically list your upcoming Skypecasts within your website or blog using our new Skypecast widget. In addition you can list your bookmarked websites from Del.icio.us or your "dugg" stories from Digg.com. We think you will like the new additions.

As you may have also noticed we are still labeled as Beta. MajikWidget will officially leave Beta when we reach our goal of producing at least one useful widget every week. This is not just a goal but a major milestone for our company and we look forward to reaching it before the year is out. With your help and on going linkware suggestions we will rise to this challenge.

Keep looking for incremental improvements as we continue to grow. We will attempt to reinstate our "Monday Update" blog post as well. It has been difficult to keep up the information flow while we have worked on the new site launch (as we refaced the blog as well). Everything should be a little more fluid now.

As usual thank you to everyone who has been a part of our growth and we appreciate you allowing us to earn your business. We added some MajikWidget swag in our new cafepress online store as well- go check it out.

Sneak Peek and Support Service Update

2006-06-23T05:44:00.000-04:00

We thought we'd give everyone a quick sneak peek at what we've been up to the last few weeks. Of course we are proud of what we have accomplished so far, but as usual we know we can do much better. As most of you may or may not know we have been working on branding and interface upgrades. The screen shot here shows the new homepage design that should appear sometime around mid to end of July.

We recognize that blog widgets are what our customers are looking and we are hard at work on adding many of those as well. The new interface design and architecture will allow us to quickly and easily add new widgets moving forward.

Service Update

Some of you have experienced our commitment to support services. We have made it our passion to respond quickly and effectively to all support issues. We will continue that service level however, we are changing our offices over the next few weeks so our support service responses may be more delayed than you have come to expect. Look for updates on this issue as we go.

MajikWidget Continues to Grow

2006-06-19T18:38:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to give everyone a quick update. We continue to grow at a rapid rate and look forward to our continued expansion. This growth has actually slowed our development down more than we would have liked. We are happy to report that we prefer to run a steady ship much more than a fast and bumpy one. We got off to a rocket of a start no doubt.

The net result is that we should be launching our new and improved site design (user experience) and new widgets starting around the middle of July. Support for our widgets has been great and we can't thank you enough. Thanks for being our customers and we love the opportunity to keep earning your business.

Housekeeping
Some of you may have noticed a few service outages over the last week or so. We have been upgrading our server clusters and routers for better system performance. You may experience a few more much smaller outages over the next few weeks but don't become alarmed. We are addressing all of these issues around the clock and in real-time.

Some of you may have also noticed the poll widget "remembers" that you have voted. This causes the poll not to be accessible by multiple computers operating from a network connection-- giving the illusion that the poll does not work all the time. We assure you the poll is working but this issues is due, in part, to our system logging IP addresses of voters for its remember feature. We are addressing this issue slowly by adding additional checks and balances to our security and "remember" layer. This particular feature is super important to our political poll users and we want to make everything top notch.

Tags: MajikWidget, Update

MajikWidget Service Update

2006-06-06T17:21:00.000-04:00

Our developers continue to work hard at enhancing the MajikWidget customer experience. Through some very diligent and creative work we have been able to remove the reliance upon the "global identity script". You no longer need to have that code installed to start using the MajikWidget service.

Current Users

For those of you who have it installed, it will not hurt to leave it installed as it is simply non-functioning as of now. You can however remove the single snippet of code without any harmful or adverse affects.

New Users

For new users you will never have to deal with this issue. So for you it means that the registration process is now significantly faster and easier.

Tags: MajikWidget Update

The Monday Update

2006-06-05T18:23:00.000-04:00

Our systems have appeared to stabilize well over the weekend and we are adding new sign-ups almost by the minute now. Keep voting in our service poll however... we want to keep that going.

For those of you sending us feedback, we hear you. A great many of our forthcoming initiatives center around your requests. We've noticed that many of you have been blogging about MajikWidget. Thank you so very much! You guys are awesome! We've been blogged about in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese. This is fantastic and we'd like to let all of you know that a multi-lingual version is on the drawing board.

In addition, we'd like to share with you some of the things we are working on right now. You can be looking for some of these additions and/or changes over the next few weeks or so.

First, we have a killer new user interface that will clean up the control panel and improve the overall user experience. You'll be able to download the code from previously generated widgets too! Here is the new logo that will be part of the new UI... feel free to use it in your blogging (or get some MajikWidget Bling for your site)!

And as most of you have been anxiously awaiting we have some new widgets in progress as well. We should be rolling out some really cool stuff soon like:

Standardized hit counters

Daily page view counters

Top 10 site referral widget (Show the last 10 sites to refer a visitor to your blog/site)

A few twists on the poll widget (ie: place items in order of preference poll)

Tag cloud widget

.... just to name a few (We are not forgetting about you guys with more than one blog either). Thanks everyone!

What do you think about the new logo?

Are we asking for it? Apparently we are

2006-06-02T16:48:00.000-04:00

Everything seems to be moving pretty smooth today. We had some minor nits to deal with early this morning but for the most part everything appears to have stabilized and is currently running smoothly. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for your support and help through this bumpy take-off. So now that we are (for the most part) off the ground running. It's time to put our money where are widgets are:

Yes, we voted for ourselves!

Post Rank Widget Resolve

2006-06-01T20:07:00.000-04:00

We have re-opened the post rank widget (now the star rank widget) in the control panel. The better part of our second public beta day has been spent addressing the issue described in our prior post. We are happy to report that all outstanding issues have resolved. To that end there are some new things about the MajikWidget service that you should be aware of immediately:

If you are currently using a post rank widget, the code you currently have installed WILL NO LONGER OPERATE. You will need to log in to the control panel and generate new code for EACH USE of the widget. You can replace your existing codes with the new code. What about all those credits? We'll cover that in a moment.

As alluded to in point #1 the implementation method has changed. Like the poll widget you will now need to generate new code for each time you plan to use the post rank widget. This will guarantee a unique identifier and allow the system to correctly keep track of the voting. The initial problem was in part due to the fact that we were using bleeding edge technology to try and automate this earlier. We're just to far ahead of things for now.

In the process we have re-tooled both the post rank widget and poll widget to be 5x more efficient. We reduced the overhead (load time) of everything and dropped about 50Mb of back end load. This should increase load time as you implement widgets.

In closing we would like to thank each and every one of you again for be patient with our beta launch. Though we anticipated many things prior to launch, Murphy's Law is just undeniable. The experienced team here has voted this beta launch one of the perfect storms in product launches. We are confident that we have aligned things in the right direction and will continue to work hard to earn your business.

When you login to your control panel in the next few hours be sure to look under the "My Account" tab. We are going to reset everyone's usage credits back to the day you first signed up. This means any polls that you have in use will continue to work and your account will not be debited for its use. Everyone who was present during this outage gets to start over with a clean slate. Thank you for being a MajikWidget client!

Tags: MajikWidget, Blog, Widget, Bug Fix

Post Rank Widget is Down (Major Bug #1)

2006-06-01T15:51:00.000-04:00

You have probably discovered by now that if you are using the Post Rank widget (with the stars) that it is not functioning properly. We apologize for this problem, however we are in the process of reworking how this widget will integrate into your blogs.

The Problem:

There is a security routine in the identity script that helps automate some of the functionality of the post rank widget. Now with heavy usage we have determined that this security routine believes itself to own all of the iFrame tags within a page. This means if you have other widgets or calls using the same methods, you suddenly find yourself with MajikWidgets all over the place. Not Good.

The Solution:

For the time being, you will simply see nothing in place of where your post rank widget should be displayed. Don't worry you didn't do anything wrong. We are going to re-tool the widget so that, like the poll, you will need to create a new piece of code for each use. Much like the poll configuration, you will simply name it, select your linkware options and generate the code. As well, we should be able to considerably speed up the cross server communication as well.

Thank you for your patience during this beta phase.

Auditing our First Day

2006-06-01T09:36:00.000-04:00

First and foremost thanks for a great opening day. It was awesome. We served up approximately 5Gig worth of bandwidth yesterday and dealt with our fair share of "launch day emergencies". You guys have been fantastic with helping us troubleshoot some annoying issues that were truly unexpected.

Who knew that our programmers couldn't do math?

"Stupid is as Stupid Does", said Forrest Gump. As most of you may have noticed when you used the polling system yesterday the math just didn't add up. It drove us crazy because quite frankly the math equation is not that complicated. In the end the issue was tracked down to a database field that keeps track of the total vote count for each poll. The wrong database field was being read which generated some of the craziest poll numbers we have ever seen. Needless to say, that has been fixed and we have sent our developers back to take the SAT's.

Hanging chads and other voting voodoo.

It came to our attention that some of the poll results were being purposely skewed. On some political blogs there were people who actually voted for their political hero more than once. Can you believe this kind of dishonesty in politics? Needless to say we tagged this our "Hanging Chad" bug and went to work right away.

Over night we were successful at updating the poll security structure. We removed reliance upon sessions and cookies to detect when a user has already voted in a particular poll and instituted more reliable and stable methods (we don't want to discuss all of them right now). The unfortunate bi-product to this update was that now everyone can re-vote at least one more time on your existing polls. So for those of you using these polls, your data may be skewed so to speak. But then again the existing data was apparently a hanging chad anyway.

Also... we updated the same routine with the ranking widget so now everyone can vote again with that system as well.

I could have constructed my own door to door survey by the time this thing loads.

We had many reports this morning of slow load times and erratic behavior during the window of 1am and 3am CDT. Since this was our initial public beta launch we planned an audit of all our systems. This audit was to see how the day actually went and how our hardware stood up. We had a pretty great day in terms of bandwidth. Over 5Gigs of data served yesterday alone. We completed a complete audit of the load-balancers and routing equipment across the entire infrastructure. During that window we experienced some intermittent and minor downtime that affected some of your visitors as we reset and calibrated some equipment.

This audit was an important step in improving the performance and reliability of the MajikWidget service, and part of our ongoing commitment to provide proactive service for our customers. But just in case you were wondering, we fired the guy who didn't send everyone an advance email notice.

It's not working on my browser, are you kidding me?

Ok we saw the screen shots and we are not calling you a liar. The fact is that we did experience some hiccups yesterday with the amount of bandwidth we were serving (thus the audit). In reality all of our widgets were designed specifically to be compatible with all modern day browsers. If it is a browser that was released in the last 365 days, we are pretty sure everything is golden.

What most of you encountered was a request to our servers that went unanswered. Our audit revealed that we had about 200 requests that did not get answered. The result on your visitors browser was that nothing appeared. The first instinct is to blame the browser; however it was simply not the browser or the code. The hardware was tired, overworked and underpaid. We're going to keep tweaking this to get it better.

So that's the major stuff.

We had a successful beta launch and are working daily on enhancing the user experience. As always we want to earn your business and appreciate the opportunity to do so!

Our first independent review!

2006-05-31T14:05:00.000-04:00

Less than 24 hours into our public beta launch and one of our First Mover Advantage Club members has already given an independent public review of MajikWidget. John Unger of Typepad Hacks gives us a pretty good thumbs up- we didn’t have to torture him or anything!

Thanks John!

Get your link on!

2006-05-31T14:01:00.000-04:00

Many of you have been asking how to get your link on our MajikWidget Users list. Well, not a problem at all. Here's the skinny:

Just log in to your MajikWidget control panel. Edit your profile and enter a "Blog Title". Once you do this, your blog will "Auto-Majikally" show up in our users list. Have fun and thanks for the support!

MajikWidget Bling

2006-05-31T10:18:00.000-04:00

Some of you have asked for some "blog flare" so here ya go. We like that you want some MajikBling for your site!

Just copy and paste the code into your site! Thanks!

Public Beta is Live!

2006-05-31T08:24:00.000-04:00

Thank you everyone signed up and used our widgets! You are now permanent members of the "First Mover Advantage Club". Your response and feedback has been fantastic and greatly appreciated. Keep the feedback coming.

Now that we are live I thought it would be a good time to explain what our beta phase is all about. Some of you have noticed that our library of widgets is not necessarily a library by volume. That is to say our entire library consists of three widgets today. We are working toward adding many widgets to the collection over the next few months, during beta. It is our goal to have the most comprehensive collection of widgets for Blogs and websites online.

Our initial focus during this beta phase (in tandem with adding more widgets) will be on making sure that integration with all the popular Blog software is easy and intuitive for everyone. We designed our widgets to work irrespective of specific software or service requirements. To this end we have exceeded our projected expectations relative to this initiative however there are a few platforms that still need our attention. We are not experts on everyone's Blog software so it takes a little time to understand their API (if any).

Thank you again everyone for making our "First Mover Advantage Club" a memorable and popular item. Look for more fun and exciting things in the future that are just for you!

Public Beta launch Wed May 31, 2006

2006-05-26T16:50:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone who signed up for our pre-beta waiting list. If you are on this list you should be receiving an email at some point between Monday night and Tuesday night with your "first mover advantage" instructions. We look forward to your comments and feedback on usage and experience.

As we roll this puppy out in public beta all support will be handled through email at support@majikwidget.com. Of course we invite you to leave your comments and questions here on the blog and we'll address them as quickly as possible.

This blog will be the official source for announcements and information regarding MajikWidget, the company and the service. In addition, as more users become a part of the system we'll start adding your blog to the link listing on the left side of this page.

Thank you for giving us a try and we look forward to earning your business.

P.S. You still have time to sign-up for "first mover advantage". Visit our temporary home page at http://www.majikwidget.com and register now!