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.