NFL Seat Views are now up! Less than two weeks ago, we introduced Seat Views for nearly every NHL, NBA and MLB team. Now almost all NFL teams have Seat Views, making it much easier to understand where you’ll be seated. The NFL schedule comes out on April 14, 2009 so stay tuned for deals.

Behold a picture of my Might Lions‘ stadium activated by hovering over one of the camera icons.

Have any feedback, feature requests or suggestions? Email us at feedback [at] ticketstumbler [dot] com.

Quick update: venue pages now offer more information about the venue: address, phone number and a Google map.

We have a big update coming soon. SPOILERS: It involves a lot of tickets

I’m thrilled to break the silence with our latest big new feature: Interactive venue maps!  At select venues, you can now choose sections you wish to sit in and see tickets for only those areas.  The instructions are incredibly simple:

Click on sections to select them; click again to deselect

Phew, that was tough!  You can select multiple sections at once, too. Whited-out sections mean that no tickets are available there.  And guess what!?  The new map filtering plays nice with all the other filters; if you change prices, quantity or anything else, that will be reflected on the map, too!

These interactive map pages are easy to find because they have a fresh new look:

Okay, maybe “fresh and new” was an exaggeration, but it is rearranged!

We’ve started out this “beta” testing phase by enabling interactive mapping for 10 venues.  All of these venues are home to multiple sports teams as well as concerts, so there are already many events working with them.  Once we’re satisfied that all bugs have been worked out and that both accuracy and performance are optimal, we’ll start adding more.

Making all venues interactive is a huge task, however; right now we have events at 1263 distinct venues!  It’s unlikely we’ll ever have these souped-up maps for every venue, but the ultimate goal is to have all the big places covered.

Try them out and let us know what you think!

** If things don’t look or work right on these new pages, please refresh your browser window and/or clear your cache! You probably have old files! **

Since our initial launch, TicketStumbler has included these nifty things called Microformats.  Microformats are basically small additions that can be made to existing HTML to give certain bits of mark-up special meaning.  For TicketStumbler, we use the hCalendar microformat to make it much faster and easier for you to add events to a calendar application.

Using Microformats

So, how do you use (”consume”) these microformats?  The easiest method for the time being is via browser plugins.  There are plugins for each major browser, which I’ll cover briefly below.

Firefox

The easiest plugin for Firefox is the Operator plugin.  Once enabled, visiting the homepage, search page, ticket listings page, and any other page which contains one or more events, the toolbar will show something like the following:

As you can see, it enables export and adding of events to multiple sites.  So, with two clicks, you could add an event to your Google Calendar, for example.

Safari

For Safari, we have the aptly named Safari Microformats plugin.  This plugin allows you to export an event to iCal:

A very minimalist, yet powerful plugin.

Internet Explorer

Perhaps the most interesting plugin comes from Microsoft, though: Oomph.  Not only is Oomph an Internet Explorer plugin, it is also a toolkit that allows you to add Oomph to any site (which we plan to do in the future).  Here’s a screenshot of Oomph in action:

As you can see by the icons under the event, you can add the event to Outlook, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, and others.  There is also a small (and unintuitive) “map” icon which will show the location of an event, if possible.

Summary

Microformats on TicketStumbler make it possible for a microformat-aware browser to export the event date, time, location, and name to various calendar services, so you don’t have to do it manually.  Just bought tickets to the game?  Jump back to the ticket listings page and add the game to your favorite calendar automatically.

We hope you enjoyed this Feature Spotlight.  We’ll be writing some more of these for other little-known but very useful features on the site.  Happy holidays!