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WelcomeWelcome to Majicko! - Magic on the Web! Majicko (pronounced Ma-gee-ko) is a Content Management System (CMS) that reduces or even eliminates the need for cumbersome and expensive "web programming" for site updates. Unlike other CMS platforms, Majicko is both cost effective and very easy to use. New content may be uploaded in a matter of minutes by anyone with basic word processing skills. [more] Latest News
New Majicko 1.3.0 Released Friday, Dec 19, 2008 12:41pm As of the launch of Bandwise's new website and the update of Majicko.com, Majicko 1.3.0 has been officially released. This new update focuses primarily on efficiency, bug fixes, security, and visual improvements rather than new features, though a few new features for administrating the software and adding content are included. The admin section has been completely rewritten. Forms are friendlier and go to extensive lengths to ensure data is entered properly. There is much more help and feature description available to assist webmasters in administrating their website. Floating tooltips are everywhere in the admin panel of Majicko 1.3.0, so getting help is as easy as pointing your mouse. There are more settings, adding more flexibility to the software and allowing for greater customization. Some anti-hacking and abuse-resistant features have been added to Majicko. The admin login system now has a failure limit, stopping all dictionary or brute-force attacks from penetrating your website controls. A number of string processing functions have also been added to main site systems to prevent injection or form hacking. Majicko has come a long way to become a solid piece of online software, easy and safe to use. A number of useful tools have been added to Majicko's admin panel for serious programmers including a Unix time converter, password hash generator, and PHP function lookup. For you SEO gurus, we have added an XML-based sitemap generator useful for registering with Google Webmaster Tools and other such XML-based sitemapping services. A number of logs and system reports have been added, providing more information on how viewers behave on the website and where they go. While new features are fewer in number, Majicko 1.3.0 does not disappoint with what has been added. Media archives have been extended to include podcasts, videos, and documents. The video gallery is a custom designed hybrid gallery capable of storing and serving local flash videos or embedded videos from Youtube. Show your viewers nearly every piece of media imaginable from your various media archives. Majicko 1.4.0 is already underway, promising exciting new features for avid Majicko users. Some new features already in the works include HTML blocks which display simple HTML code as oppose to classic PHP blocks. Static pages will have the ability to override default block placement and template selection, making certain pages standout and provide more relative information for the current content. [more]Majicko Sold! Thursday, Mar 06, 2008 1:23pm A lot has happened with Majicko over the past few months. The Majicko CMS system as well as Majicko.com is now officially the property of Bandwise LLC, a web software development company based out of Shreveport, LA. The original developer of the Majicko CMS is now an employee of Bandwise and continues further development of the system. Latest Announcements Thursday, Oct 04, 2007 1:52pm We have two major announcements this week. Majicko 1.1.0 has now been released and is available to the public. The features for this new version of Majicko include, but are certainly not limited to, an event calendar, user comment system for media archives (with anti-spam support system included), improved website security against banned and pending members, and an improved template engine for easy site management. You can now edit your column blocks from your admin panel with ease (some PHP knowledge is required for this). The admin panel is still the same, but new features have been added to make managing your site easier than before! The initial phrase system is better integrated with the default installation of Majicko, so there is very little "hard-coded" text throughout the site. Latest BlogsBeating Hardware Overlays
Thursday, Nov 15, 2007 1:42pm Ever wanted to make a screenshot or screen capture of a video on your computer and it resulted in nothing but a black screen with no video image in it? If so, then you've been victimized by the infamous "hardware overlay" effect. This is a very common problems in Windows Media Player and others on Windows operating systems. What is a Hardware Overlay? Well, a hardware overlay is a feature produced by the video card on your computer to help improve system performance for displaying videos. When your video card communicates with the graphics subsystem of your operating system (i.e. Windows), it essentially sets aside an amount of video memory for your operating system to use. This is where all of your windows, displays, and most applications are displayed on your monitor. Most computer operations stay within these bounds. Now, when you want to play a video (an application that requires your video card to redraw your display several times per second), your media player typically attempts to improve system performance by requesting additional memory from the video card that is outside of what Windows uses (out of bounds). Because the video memory for the overlay lies outside of Window's reach, you can't capture it with a simple screen grab like everything that is within Window's portion of video memory. In short, the videos you watch on your computer are not being displayed in the media player window at all. The video is actually being displayed on your monitor at a hardware level (kinda like the control box that appears when you adjust your monitor). You've probably noticed that when you try to paste a screenshot that you captured from the media player, the video shows up (probably off-center) in the area of color that you pasted! However, when you close the video player, the picture you pasted becomes black and you can never get the video's image to show up there. That is no glitch. There is a logical reason for this. When the media player requests the additional memory from the video card, it also defines a specific color called the "chroma key." This color is used as a mask to help the video card determine where on your monitor to display the video. It is usually an off black color. You guessed it! That black color that you got when you pasted the empty media player window into MS Paint was actually the chroma key! That's why you can see the video in the Paint window while it is displaying the chroma key color. The video card thinks Paint is the media player! How to beat the overlay? If you want to take a screen shot or screen capture of a video, but the overlay is stopping you, you'll be very happy to know there are a few ways to beat it. First, you can set your media player not to use overlays. In Windows Media Player, you do this by following Tools => Options => Performance => Advanced. There are two checkboxes here to turn overlays on or off. One is for DVDs and the other is for everything else. You can also set Windows not to allow hardware overlays. For Windows XP, right click on your desktop and click Properties => Settings => Advanced => Troubleshoot and move the slider all the way to the left. This will stop all overlays, system-wide. By the way, I recommend you place these settings back after you've got your screenshots. Overlays do help improve video performance, hence their purpose! There are also some online media players that display videos in an overlay and some of these may even continue to use overlays even if you set Windows not to use them. What do you do then? Here's a neat little trick! Most video cards can only handle ONE hardware overlay at a time. So if you turn your overlays on (turn them back on in both Windows and your media player), open a video on your computer, pause that video, and THEN navigate to the online player you want to copy from, the online player is left with only two options: it can either error because your overlay is already being used by your media player or (more likely) it will just display the video without the overlay. If the online media player displays the video without the overlay, then screen grab all you want because it's free game now! I hope this tutorial was helpful. Have fun! Master Keys are Master Targets Saturday, Sep 22, 2007 11:00am Password Security One of the primary fears of Internet usage is identity theft. As the Internet brings humanity closer together by making communication as easy as typing at a keyboard and sharing visual data via websites, privacy becomes an increasing issue, especially for people who are not accustomed to Internet security and those of us who are just too lazy to make the effort. One of the root causes of privacy violations on the Internet is password security. One of the most fundamental rules of Internet usage, and the most ignored, is password security. These days, user interactivity is what makes a website. In order to properly regulate user activity, privacy, and website security; website membership/login scripts are used. Each member, upon registration, must choose a public username and a secret password that acts as a key to their account. Of course, most of us all know this. What most of us do not know is how passwords are stored on the websites we go to and how secure their databases are. Contrary to popular belief, it is not impossible to obtain a user's password from some website's database or another. There are hacking methods, like SQL injection, that can be used to acquire a user's password from the database. Webmasters typically do everything they can to encrypt or otherwise secure account information, but there are some website out there that are not secure and users will never know the difference. Your Responsibility Password Phishing This is a shining example of how important it is to mix up your passwords and change them frequently. When you get an account on some website, their password storage system might not be encrypted. The website just might be collecting passwords for this purpose! How do you stop this from happening to you? By mixing up your passwords and changing them frequently! Choosing Passwords - The Split Key Method Majicko's Encryption System TOP 100 is bad!!! Thursday, Aug 16, 2007 3:09pm Have any of you webmasters out there ever seen those dynamic TOP 100 site directories? If you've had a website for longer than a few months, you've probably seen a lot of them and likely registered with several of them. TOP100s look something like these:   One of the first rules to making money with your website is to generate traffic. One of first rules to generating traffic is building search engine rank. You've no doubt read that getting a high search engine rank requires, among other things, reciprocal linking with other sites. The more websites that link to you, the more popular your site appears to the search engine and, thus the higher your page rank becomes. This is the reason you have probably gone around to TONS and TONS of these TOP100 directories, registering with each one that would accept your site, and pray the search engines find you through them all. Unfortunately, you're going to be very disappointed. Most search engines these days, particularly Google, will not index the links in these directories. Let me explain why. META Refresh Back in the day, sly and malicious webmasters would attempt to fool search engines into thinking their sites had more or different content than they really did by using the infamous "META refresh" tag. This HTML tag, for those of you who don't know, allows the webmaster to redirect viewers to other pages or other sites automatically when someone enters a page with this tag in it. Malicious web designers would sucker the search engines into indexing a page that would be rich with all kinds of relative content so they would get indexed in various places in search engine results. A user would see this page in the search results, click on it, and then the META refresh tag would automatically forward the user to a completely different site, often a porn site. This got very annoying for many search engine users. In order to resolve this annoyance, search engines set their crawlers to ignore pages that contain the refresh tag. Counting Clicks What does this abusive tag have to do with TOP 100 directories? Well, these directories typically use the META refresh tag on their links instead of linking directly to the sites within their directory. This is how they are able to count how many people click on the links in their directory and how they can assign rank to popular site. In order to count what links are clicked, the link takes you an outgoing page with a dynamic script (i.e. "linkout.php?id=322") that counts the click, then uses the refresh tag to forward you to your proper destination. This is a clever and effective system, but search engines will not acknowledge these links! Webmasters who design these reciprocal link programs and TOP 100 directory scripts have a difficult choice to make. Do they want to favor link popularity by putting popular links at the top? Or do they want to give their partner sites their reciprocal link points for SEO purposes? Guess which choice they normally choose. That's right! They favor popular links and ignore the search engine issue entirely, assuming none of their partner sites will know the difference. Resolution If you want your site to get its search engine points, register with directories that actually point their links at the actual sites they are suppose to go to and not through some outgoing page. Point your mouse at the links and see if that is where they go. It may be necessary to check the source code of the directory to ensure some javascript isn't faking the status bar of your browser. For you webmasters out there who run these directories, here is a resolution for you...Ajax!!! With a little knowledge of Ajax, you can write a dynamic function that will point directly to your partner sites and count the clicks at the same time. You will have the best of both worlds and everyone will be happy. Sounds nice, doesn't it? Majicko uses this technique for the purposes I have mentioned herein. The external link system of Majicko not only counts clicks and arranges popular sites to the top of the list, but it also links directly to each partner site without using deceptive Javascript. |
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