We decided to add an event comparison tool to TicketStumbler. And though you’ll probably only profit figuaratively, we have the compare and contrast part down. Fresh off of Thanksgiving travel and inspired by our airline friends, we created a multiple event comparison feature for TicketStumbler. Or MECH, if you will (the H stands for Hi!). Our favorite airline sites allow you to input multiple dates at once when searching for a given flight. For the flexible traveler, this is great as you can often find much better deals/seats/routes when you’re not too picky. It’s sort of like dating. Just be careful who you’re sitting next to.

Anyways…we thought we could implement this same sort of thinking to sports & concert tickets. The idea, as noted above, certainly isn’t original (heck even doing ticket search is unoriginal), but applies rather well to ticket costs and stadium seating. I know what you’re thinking: “I already have pretty filters, what good is more comparison stuff?” Well let me tell you…

The New York Yankees are visiting your beloved Detroit Tigers. Your boss is busy the next few days at an executive retreat learning about synergy & right sizing so you know you can leave a bit early Monday through Wednesday when the Yankees are in town. With bossman out of the way, all you really care about is finding the best seats at a good price. Hello event comparison! Don’t worry, your filter friends can play too.

Or, say you’re unemployed like us; dates and times don’t really matter. The only thing that does is price. The comparison allows us to find the cheapest tickets for the month of December to see our beloved Bruins break glass, hit people and occasionally, win.

Or, the pretty girl you’ve been trying to talk to at the office is a huge AC/DC fan…it’s one of the reasons you like her. That and her…Well, you don’t want to look like a chump feigning courtship and seduction with cheap seats. Instead, you can find the best seats possible (she’s cute and likes concerts & hockey – money is no object) by comparing both Bay Area shows at once.

Hopefully you understand now. This feature turned out to be a nice Sunday afternoon project, but we were finished in time to watch the Sunday night football game. And by watch I mean pass out on the couch beer in hand. Enjoy and please let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback.

Tutorial

Above, the comparisons were linked to directly, so you may be wondering how to get to them.  There are currently two ways:

1. From any event listings page, such as this one.
2. From any ticket listings page, such as this one.

Both these pages provide noticeable notes indicating how one would access the “comparator,” but for posterity: From an event listing page, click a Venue link found in the sidebar and from a ticket listings page, click on the “click right here” link under the ticket table.

Once you are actually on the compare page, there are simple instructions located in the sidebar of the page.  Very simply:  Click on the calendar icons of events you want to compare (click again to de-select) then click the big green button in the sidebar.  Done and done.

Bonus Features Unlocked!

Congratulations, you’ve unlocked the bonus features of this blog post!

Bonus Feature #1: Along the way to finalizing this feature, Tom mananged to find a way to improve the method used for loading ticket listings.  Listings now load at a speed some might consider too fast.  I managed to load a comparison of over 20,000 listings in a couple seconds!

Bonus Feature #2: You probably won’t even notice this, but when you click on “Buy” links now, they point to an internal page on our site that forwards you onto the ticket partner.  Later on, this intermediary page will be used to ensure tickets you want are still available before sending you to the site.

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.  While you were feasting, I was battling evil itself: Internet Explorer 6.  My Thanksgiving gift to those few of you who use IE6 are some visual improvements to the site.  TicketStumbler now looks almost the same in IE6 as it does in other, more evolved browsers.  There were also a few minor fixes to the blog template which should be propagated to the other blogs by tomorrow (clicking inside the search box now clears the text, for example).

Finally, there will be some fluctuation in ticket providers as we’ve taken a few offline due to poor reliability.  Showing very outdated listings is nearly as bad as showing none at all, so we do what we have to in order to keep that from happening.

We’ve just added two new filters to ticket listings pages: Minimum Price and Standing Room Only Toggle.  The former is pretty simple; it allows you to select a minimum price for tickets.  This is useful for when you want to find mid-range tickets.  Just select a maximum price and a minimum price and only see tickets which are between those two.  The second new filter (under “Other Filters”) allows you to show/hide tickets labeled as “Standing Room Only”, “SRO”, etc.  This filter is checked by default (meaning you will see SRO tickets) because many concerts are SRO (or the best tickets are SRO, in some cases).

Additionally, we’ve gone ahead and changed how the FEEDBACK link works (located in the navigation bar of every page).  Now when you click on it, a small window will overlay the screen allowing you to suggest a feature or report a bug immediately right from the window.  Hopefully this makes it a little easier (and more convenient) to tell us what’s wrong!

A day late and a dollar short, I know.  That’s okay, though, because I left myself a loophole that allows me to renege on past promises!  Huzzah!

I had initially planned to announce a few new features today, but in the past week a few of our providers have moved to providing Web Services instead of leaving it to us to aggregate their ticket listings.  This is a significant improvement that benefits everyone involved (including you, our wonderful users) but has also required me to push back some new stuff to update our code.  I’m quite surprised by and happy for the sudden improvements these companies are making.  I can’t in good conscious attribute it to our lobbying practices, but since I’m not burdened with a good conscious:  It’s all thanks to TicketStumbler!  Competitors, you can thank us later!

I plan on making another post sometime before next week showcasing the new stuff that was pushed back.  Also, we have a partnership in the works with a new company that we’ll be announcing as soon as it’s ready.

This post brought to you by the letters “T” and “S”.

First, to the most important matter: Today is my birthday!  Yes, it’s true; in a move that has stunned analysts everywhere, I have managed to survive another year!  Lets all take a few moments to reflect on my many spectacular accomplishments from the preceding 24 years…

… … …

Damn, that didn’t take nearly as much time as I allotted.  Oh well, on to business at hand.  This week I bring you numerous menial-at-best improvements/changes to TicketStumbler.  I would have had more, but I’ve been rather busy chasing a very infuriating bug around for the last week or so; every time I squashed it, the damn thing came back in another form!  I won’t say it’s gone for good now because that would only motivate it to redouble its efforts to drive me insane, but I will say that it is at bay for the moment.  Below is a non-exhaustive list of tasks I managed to accomplish between rage sessions:

• More Local/Popular events on homepage (soon, a link to all local upcoming events)
• Better ordering of some categories
• Pagination added to search results and event listing pages (10/page, for now at least)
• Presidential Inauguration for Barack Obama tickets are available
• The blogs page now lists the sports and concerts blogs (whole-page refresh is still in the works)
• Numerous minor bug fixes I can’t quite recall (but it sounds good!)

Perhaps next week will be contain an order of magnitude more features and additions, but since our top priority is currently the quality and quantity of our listings, I make no promises!  You fine people come here for tickets so tickets are what we must provide (unless you come here to live vicariously through me, which is understandable)!  We’ve become hopelessly addicted to tickets, I must admit.  There are never enough and the next one never beats that first magical ticket we listed what feels like a lifetime ago.  I think we’ll be chasing this dragon forever…