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.