Slow but steady

Been making steady progress on TixPix version 2.0. I have the new homepage about 50% complete and the new "Events" page also about 50% complete. Hope to have those both complete by mid Feb. After that I'll need to complete the ticket listings page followed by the listing "Details" page. Also in parallel I'm working on my seating chart prototype interactive viewer.
All of this minus the seating charts should be complete by the end of March.

TixPix MVC

So... it's no secret that TixPix was developed using Asp.Net. This is evidenced by the use of web-forms. A design decision has been made to utilize Microsofts newer technology which is ASP.NET MVC 4. Hopefully this will streamline development with a better separation of concerns between the data model and the UI and the business logic.

Life's Priorities

So, while I would love to continue developing TixPix.com as my full time venture, there has been a pleasant shift in priorities within my personal life that will undoubtedly affect the amount productive working hours in each day and week that I can devote to TixPix. That being said, I am still fully committed to the completion of TixPix 2.0. I believe the new version of the site will be much more well received than the first version, it will simply take a little bit longer to get there than I was anticipating.

Shifting Strategies

By far and large the most important goal of 2013 is to generate a large amount of inbound traffic to TixPix.com. The main reason that TixPix traffic is currently suffering is that at present the homepage has the appearance of low activity. For example if you walked into a retail store and noticed that they had less than 5 items for sale in their whole store and it seemed like the aisles had no other customers, then you're likely to turn around immediately, leave, and seek out a store with better inventory with more active use.

Additionally the other problem with TixPix is that currently all visitors must register before they can truly utilize the site. To support the goal of increasing inbound traffic TixPix is going to remove the registration/login process from the site for version 2.0. This will lower the commitment that a user must make when visiting and using TixPix.com. Lowering the users commitment increases the probability that a user will browse around longer and be able to find what they are looking for, get what they need and leave without ever disrupting the flow of their browsing/search experience. This in turn will help improve return visitor statistics and increase search engine page rank, while also spurring word of mouth advertisement.

2013

The holiday season was enjoyable. I haven't touched any TixPix related development work in the last two weeks because I was enjoying some much deserved holiday time while on travel with the family.

Yesterday, I got back into the swing of things. I met with one of my co-developers and we went over some of the new code for the TixPix 2.0. I was pretty impressed with the results. I cannot yet reveal at this time the details of the code, but it is awesome.

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.