Juggling

Lately I've been bouncing back and forth between tasks. Making progress on the seating charts. They're being drawn in AutoCAD and then there is a series of conversions and handshakes that the drawing file must go through before it is a functioning interactive seating chart viewable in a web browser. It's actually remarkable the amount of work that goes into creating an interactive seating chart. Also been continuing the progress on the new site layout. Soon I'll be adding the schedules of events to NFL MLB and NBA into my database so that event page shows the relevant events for a given sports team search.

Also have been putting some extra work into my other website www.PlayoffRace.com. I recently recruited an online friend into the fold to be a contributor to PlayoffRace. Together we are going to finally perfect the clinching algorithm that I've spent the last 3 years working on for the NFL. It is currently a 16,000 line of code beast. Rest assured it will get finished in 2013 though :).

Back to seating charts

Last couple of days I've been working on mapping technology that is required of my seating charts. Lots of python scripts. Been having the hardest time just getting some examples working on this python based map server. 1 week ago I had never touched anything python in my life and now I'm having to dive into the belly of some of these python scripts to get this to work on windows. I suspect the scripts were originally written for unix or a Mac so certain things aren't wired up to work properly like path variables etc. Oh and this stuff has all kinds of dependencies so there is been a crap load of installing other python packages. It's absurd how much I've had to learn in just the past week. But these seating charts will be worth it. Just a few more hurdles to overcome like having a properly assigned spatial reference and figuring out how to cache my maps. From there it should be smooth sailing.

I hate CSS when doing layouts

I hate CSS when doing layout stuff. I could take a vacation with the amount of time I've wasted trying to do with Divs what I can do with a table in minutes. They should have made CSS with some constraint based selectors so element heights and widths could be defined as a function of other element heights and widths. Just like how one constrains layouts in a CAD program. Float and clear just don't cut it and all too often we have to fall back on absolute positioning and JavaScript to achieve a truly fluid layout that doesn't screw up when changing the browser zoom level.

TixPix 2.0 under construction

While the wife was out of town last weekend I decided to completely redesign the whole website. The purpose of the redesign is to give those arriving at the site for the first time that wow factor and to improve my SEO (search engine optimization), which is what enables the site to be ranked higher in the results of a search engine. I pulled back to back to back all nighters separated by only 3 hours of sleep during each marathon coding session. 4 family sized boxes of Mac n Cheese, some energy drinks, couple of vitamins, and uncanny focus got me through. The good news is that most of the database structure will be able to remain the same so in essence it is mostly the presentation code that has to get reworked. I've already begun creating the new pages and hope to be done by the end of December. It's gonna be some long 16-20 hour days until the holidays are here. I can't wait to unveil the new www.tixpix.com website version 2.0. It's clean and sexy!

Trick or Treat

Happy Halloween! Lots changed since my last blog post. We started an ad in the Badger Herald of Madison, WI. The ad was for 43,000 impressions on the sports page and takes users straight to www.TixPix.com Well after 5 days of running the ad it has seen over 1000 times on the sports page. Hopefully this will lead to some new ticket listings and possibly someone purchasing some of the tickets that are for sale currently.

URL Rewriting

I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to get URL rewriting to work. Unsuccessful so far. The main advantages to URL rewriting is that a page that would normally look like myexample.com/test.aspx?product=17 can be made to look my example.com/test/17 which is much cleaner looking and more easily entered by the user. So I am gonna have to delegate this task to someone that has a bit more experience in this area.

TBD

So today I focused on adding college teams to the TixPix Database so that the Seller Ticket Form can be easily used for listing tickets to college games. I got all the Big Ten teams entered into the database including the venues for those teams added to the database too. Then I added a visiting conference and home conference select box to the ticket listing form so that teams not within the specified conference are filtered out. This provides the user a smaller more manageable list of teams to choose from. I got all that done and decided to create a test listing for a Ohio St. vs Wisconsin game. But then I noticed the problem. On my form I make the user specify the start time of the event. When I looked up the start time for this game, ESPN still has the event time listed as TBD. Problem is that my ticket seller form didn't have a way to choose TBD. So I added a TBD button to my TimePicker control. To do this I had to reach deep into the bowels of Jquery UI and make some fancy JavaScript alterations to the base code. But now it works.

Venue Seating Charts

I just took a quick glance at my browser history and I have easily been to over 2000 different web pages in the past 3 days. I spent that time researching and experimenting with different technologies that I can use to create the seating charts for TixPix. Currently there are no seating charts on the site and I think I finally have my head wrapped around the technology that I plan to use. I wish I could reveal more details about them now, but in effort to maintain an element of surprise over my competitors you'll just have to wait and see when they are finished. Hopefully they won't take any longer than 6 months to roll out.

That Professional Look

Somehow our brain can instantly distinguish between a professional website and an amateur website. I would have to admit that TixPix has been leaning more towards looking like an amateur website. I spent most of today trying to improve the graphics design of the site by applying subtle touches here and there. Added some textures, improved my font selections, added some shadows and voila. I am very pleased with the progress that was made. There is a clear improvement over the way it previously looked and I would have to say now it leans more towards looking like a professional site but it still needs more work.

Tomorrow I hope to start working on integrating PayPal more seamlessly into the checkout process.

C# Facebook API

I spent my ENTIRE day experimenting with the Facebook API and SDK's. I finally had a triumphant success and was able to successfully post a Photo to my Facebook programmatically from the TixPix app. I literally let out a giant roar when I finally accomplished it. So ultimately the Facebook Publishing capabilities of the SocialAuth plugin kind of suck pretty bad. It is very limited in the types of post it can create presently and their is virtually no documentation on how to expand upon its capabilities. I'm still goin to use it for my login script, because it handles multiple providers. Ultimately I resorted to using C# Facebook API for publishing capabilities. I love it. The documentation is better but far from perfect. Its about time there is some love for the .net community regarding Facebook integration. I'm kind of tired of seeing all their examples in PHP. Lastly I'll end this post by exclaiming that if you are developing in Visual Studio and haven't installed the nuget package expander then you're missing out. It so cleanly adds your dependencies and makes the appropriate config file changes to your project without even blinking.

Research & Development

Still have a laundry list of open work but from time to time I like to brainstorm new ideas for TixPix. The biggest problem I am having to overcome right now is getting more people to know about the site on a very limited budget. I believe that if a product is good enough word will spread naturally without necessarily pumping oodles of ad dollars into promoting the product. Since this is my biggest problem right now it largely steered my brainstorming efforts for the night.

Ultimately I need to do a better job of leveraging social media, primarily Facebook. I tried for a while to figure out how to insert dynamic ads onto Facebook to no avail, but then it occurred to me that I could insert a static image of an advertisement for the specific user that just created their listing at TixPix. The trick is that I will have to dynamically generate the ad image realtime so that each Facebook image post is customized to show the details of the newly created ticket listing within the image. To do this I will need to use the HTML 5 canvas feature and then have my server code draw to the canvas and then convert the canvas to an image file. This will need to be performed as a batch job though because Internet explorer doesn't support some of the method calls needed to perform the image save. This means I can't have the code execute client side because I can't guarantee that the user won't be using IE. I already know how to publish a post from a Facebook app to Facebook using the graph API. But I am trying to figure out how to post an image using the graph API. There are a few examples on the web that involve using PHP but I need to be able to execute this image post as a single FB graph api HTTP POST command because i am using a special framework called socialauth-net which transmits the POST command. I think I might have figured it out, but I'll have to test it out to be sure. In the end if I can get this working it should greatly improve my exposure within facebook since ill be able to post large TixPix ads which are each customized to the users experience. I am setting the TixPix app up to require permission EACH time that TixPix app would like to post on the users behalf.

Marketing materials

Here is some graphics design work that I did for some business cards I'm gonna have made up for www.tixpix.com I didn't bother mentioning in the design that TixPix is for buying and selling of sports tickets and concert tickets because sometimes less is more. If they are curious then perhaps that would draw them to the site even more.

TixPix and PlayoffRace Linked

Tonight I created an ad banner for TixPix. The dimensions are 120px wide by 600px tall. When creating the ad I was trying to come up with more content to fill inside of the ad. I got the idea to include a picture of an auction preview box. But the. It occurred to me that I ought to be creating a dynamic ad with an auction countdown clock built right into the ad. This would attract more users to the ad and ultimately to www.tixpix.com. It further occurred to me that I need to create an API that third party content publishers can access auction Details info from TixPix for the purpose of publishing dynamics ads outside of the TixPix garden.

I also sent Mark Zuckerberg a message asking him to get his developers working on expanding the Facebook API to allow developers of apps to be permitted to post dynamic content ads directly into a users wall or news feed but only on a per permission basis by the user which must be granted manually each and every time the app wants to publish to ones timeline or status. This could actually be a potential additional revenue stream for Facebook while allowing marketers to potentially reach users friends in a less intrusive manner.

Karma

So today I worked mostly on marketing and search engine optimization aspects of www.tixpix.com I also researched some ways in which I might be able to increase my inventory of ticket listings. I came across these fellas that maintain a website that collates data on ticket listings across the web. Kind of like the search engine dog pile but for tickets. I reached out to the founders of this website expressing interest in talking with them more about the industry etc. I know they received my email and read it and I know that they visited my website based in my google analytics software. At this point I have not received an email in return from them or any other response for that matter. So it appears they are choosing to ignore me. and that is their Karma.

Update it appears their Karma may have just improved because I got an email recently asking if I'd be interested in an advertisement relationship. I'll have to get more details but sounds potentially promising. We'll see.

Craigslist Sucks

So after listing my first tickets on TixPix, I thought it would be a great idea to post a listing on Craigslist to advertise the tickets that I had for sale.  Bad idea.  Within 9 hours of creating the Craigslist ad my ad was buried under 600 new Craigslist ads in the same category and market.  Apparently there is a network of ticket dealers that are part of some pyramid scheme where they pay a couple thousand dollars to have access to this ticket platform for which they can make a cookie cutter ticket website.  So you've got all these assholes paying this platform and then everyone is competing against each other and stinking up the ticket category on craigslist with the same inventory but a different front end UI and domain name.  It's almost comical.  Unless I am willing to resort to guerrilla marketing tactics, it looks like I'll be avoiding craigslist like the plague.  Most important is working on increasing my Google page rank :)

My First Ticket Listing

I listed my first sports tickets on www.TixPix.com today. They were for a pair of Green Bay Packers vs Tennessee Titans Tickets.

Lots of busy work.

Today I worked on drafting a message that I will personalize and send out to each of my Facebook friends inviting them the the site and seeing if I can fulfill any ticket related services they have upcoming. My hope is I won't annoy my friends. I don't want to come off sounding like an advertisement when in reality I genuinely need the help of others to get this thing launched. I guess I'll know who my true friends are soon.

While workin on this I noticed the default thumbnail that Facebook shows for TixPix looks really bad. I spent a a couple hours figuring that out and working on some much needed artwork. Now the TixPix thumbnails in Facebook look great.

Also fixed some other minor bullshit with how buttons appear in safari on iOS devices. The trick is -WebKit-appearance: none;

Also started a google Adwords account and crated my first campaign, which is temporarily paused.

Tomorrow I will really purchase some tickets.

Ready to Launch

After one year of solid web development I am ready to launch TixPix. Tomorrow I am gonna secure some tickets to list on TixPix. Goal is to get 6 pairs of tickets, each pair being to a different event in a different city. I'm going for variety. Once tickets are purchased then the advertisement phase of this begins.

Planning Stages

Many brainstorming sessions took place to help shape the concepts of what I wanted to TixPix to be and in what ways it would be better than existing secondary ticket markets. One thing occurred to me early on was that just starting out my costs would be very low and this would allow me to significantly undercut StubHub. I would also allow users to list their tickets as an auction. TixPix would become a hybrid between Craigslist, StubHub and eBay.

What is TixPix

So what is TixPix and how did I conceive of it.  In 2008 I got the idea to start a website that would improve upon the clinching and elimination scenarios for NFL teams as the playoffs drew near.  I worked on the project passively in my spare time while still employed at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Flight Controller for the Space Shuttle Program.  The domain I wanted was PlayoffRace.com but another person already owned it.  I contacted the owner and explained how it was that I wanted to use the domain and he had similar ambitions but not the time to bring the site to fruition.  I offered to buy the domain from him from him for $150 plus a $100 dollar donation to a charity of his choice.  He agreed, and I made the donation to the MS society per his choice.  In 2008 I launched this website and it has doubled in traffic every year since its launch.  I always viewed PlayoffRace as a stepping stone to a more profitable website.  For months I contemplated how I wanted to eventually turn PlayoffRace profitable.  I had thoughts of creating a paid for app and possibly adding gambling into the mix.  After long consideration I concluded the best use of PlayoffRace would be to try and steer some of my growing PlayoffRace traffic onto a site that sold tickets to the events for which I was computing stats on.  This would certainly be a much smaller legal headache then trying to run a gambling operation.  And so it was.  I would create a ticket website where fans could buy and sell tickets to one another and compete with the monopolies of eBay and StubHub (which eBay also owns). I must have searched over 1000 domain names before I found one that I liked and was within my price reach.  "TixPix.com" was for sale on a domain auction site and I placed a bid of $300.  My bid won.  TixPix.com was born.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to document the progress of my new startup company, TixPix LLC.  My goal is to write at least one blog entry per week highlighting the main progress points for the week.  I believe that the American dream is still alive and well, so follow me on my journey from unemployment to riches in the weeks months and years to follow.