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.