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.

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

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

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:

1. Standardized hit counters


2. Daily page view counters


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


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


5. 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?

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!

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

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.

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!