This week I managed to tear myself away from boring back-end work long enough to push out a new feature we’ve been wanting to get out practically since we launched:  Ticket Availability Checking.  Sometimes, between the time that we index a ticket listing and a user clicks on it, the tickets are bought.  In some cases this ends with the user looking at an error page or being sent back to the event listings on the partner site.  Now, instead, we check for current availability where possible so that we don’t send you on a wild goose chase.

I say, “where possible,” because not all providers support a way for us to check for ticket availability.  For those that do not provide a standard way, we often make up our own standard.  Unfortunately, sometimes that’s just not possible.  We apologize in advanced if you get sent to a page that doesn’t contain the tickets your heart so desires; we did our best, promise!

There is nothing you need to do to use this feature.  When you click on “Buy Tickets!” you will be sent to a page that quickly checks to make sure those tickets are available.  It will either send you on your way or implore you to close the window and try your luck again.  As always, please let us know how we can improve this new feature for the benefit of all mankind.

This post brought to you by Crosby, Stills & Nash

Honestly, I don’t even know where the weeks go anymore.

Recently, I’ve been working on some boring backend improvements to the site.  We’ve also done some planning and upfront work to improve local search, including zip code searching and much better geo-location (showing events near you rather than just in the same city / state) so look for those improvements soon.

Until next time… somebody buy me a calendar.  Preferrably with pictures of puppies.

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  Showing very outdated listings is nearly as bad as showing none at all, so we do what we have to in order to keep that from happening.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”.