Patent Application
20130111314
This invention relates generally to content displayed as pages on the World Wide Web, and more particularly to selecting images as part of such content.
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The following notice applies to the software and data as described below and in the drawings hereto: Copyright ©1999, eBay Inc., All Rights Reserved.
Images are frequently used on World Wide Web (web) pages as illustration and to make the pages more attractive. Both purposes are particularly important when the Web site displaying the pages is a business. A user is more likely to explore a web site that shows images of the items for sale. In a Web-based business, such as an auction site, in which the inventory turns over rapidly, regenerating one or more web pages to display new images is especially important. However, choosing the new images to display is currently a manual process and thus cannot be accomplished as rapidly as may be desirable. Furthermore, once the images are selected, they must be integrated with the other content on the web page. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide for the dynamic selection of images for web pages and for the automatic integration of the selected images to permit frequent and rapid modifications of the web pages.
The above-mentioned shortcomings, disadvantages and problems are addressed by the disclosed subject matter, which will be understood by reading and studying the following specification.
In various embodiments disclosed herein, a gallery widget provides for the automatic selection and integration of images in a markup language document, such as a web page. A widget tag may be encoded on the web page that invokes the gallery widget when the page is being processed for display. The gallery widget is a utility program that selects a pre-determined number of images from a group of images and places the images on the web page. The number of images and their respective locations on the web page may be specified in the widget tag. The gallery widget can select the images from a gallery that contains all available images or from a pool of images created from the gallery using a gallery administration tool.
Because the gallery widget is automatically invoked when the page is being readied for display, there is no manual intervention required so web pages encoded with the widget tag can be regenerated as frequently as necessary to maintain current images on the pages. When it is desirable to choose certain types of images during a time period, such as for promotional purposes, the gallery administration tool allows a user to create a pool of images having common characteristics in advance.
The disclosed subject matter describes systems, methods, and computer-readable media of varying scope. In addition to the aspects and advantages of the subject matter described in this summary, further aspects and advantages of the subject matter will become apparent by reference to the drawings and by reading the detailed description that follows.
a-B are flowcharts of a gallery widget method to be performed by a computer according to an embodiment of the invention;
In the following detailed description of embodiments of the invention, reference is made to the accompanying drawings in which like references indicate similar elements, and in which is shown by way of illustration specific embodiments in which the invention may be practiced. These embodiments are described in sufficient detail to enable those skilled in the art to practice the invention, and it is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and that logical, mechanical, electrical and other changes may be made without departing from the scope of the present invention. The following detailed description is, therefore, not to be taken in a limiting sense, and the scope of the present invention is defined only by the appended claims.
An overview of a network-based transaction facility in which embodiments of the invention may be practiced is first described to provide a context for the invention. Next the operations and methods of the invention are described in conjunction with block diagrams and flowcharts. An exemplary computer hardware and software environment suitable for use with the invention are then described. Finally a conclusion of the detailed description is presented.
The following description of
The auction facility 10 includes one or more of a number of types of front-end servers, namely page servers 12 that deliver web pages (e.g., markup language documents), picture servers 14 that dynamically deliver images to be displayed within web pages, listing servers 16, CGI servers 18 that provide an intelligent interface to the back-end of facility 10, and search servers 20 that handle search requests to the facility 10. E-mail servers 21 provide automated e-mail communications to users of the facility 10 and other services as known in the art.
The back-end servers include a database engine server 22, a search index server 24 and a credit card database server 26, each of which maintains and facilitates access to a respective database.
The Internet-based auction facility 10 may be accessed by a client program 30, such as a browser (e.g., the Internet Explorer distributed by Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash.) that executes on a client machine 32 and accesses the facility 10 via a network such as, for example, the Internet 34. Other examples of networks that a client may utilize to access the auction facility 10 include a wide area network (WAN), a local area network (LAN), a wireless network (e.g., a cellular network), or the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) network.
The client and server machines are described in conjunction with
A system level overview of the operation of two embodiments of the invention are described by reference to
In the embodiment illustrated in
When used in conjunction with the auction facility 10 shown
<Home Page Gallery, categoryID=M, numitems=N, picwidth=X, picheight=Y, picspace=Z, numrows=R, numcols=C>,
the text “Home Page Gallery” identifies which gallery widget should be invoked when the home page is compiled, M identifies a particular category of images to be displayed on the home page. N specifies the number of images, and the combination of X, Y, Z, R and C defines the coordinates on the home page for the image locations.
In an alternate embodiment illustrated in
When used in conjunction with the auction facility 10 of
The system level overview of the operation of an embodiment of the invention has been described in this section of the detailed description. A gallery widget has been described that automatically selects and places images on a web page when a widget tag encoded on the web page invokes the widget. The gallery widget can select the images from a Gallery data structure containing all available images or from one or more gallery image pool data structures created by a gallery administration tool using pre-determined filtering criteria. While the invention is not limited to any particular widget tag, for sake of clarity a specific tag format has been described. it will be appreciated that the description of the invention in terms of a web page encompasses all documents written in any markup language.
In the previous section, a system level overview of the operations of embodiments of the invention was described. In this section, the particular methods of the invention are described in terms of computer software with reference to a series of flowcharts. The methods to be performed by a computer constitute computer programs made up of computer-executable instructions. Describing the methods by reference to a flowchart enables one skilled in the art to develop such programs including such instructions to carry out the methods on suitably configured computers (the processor of the computer executing the instructions from computer-readable media) If written in a programming language conforming to a recognized standard, such instructions can be executed on a variety of hardware platforms and for interface to a variety of operating systems. In addition, the present invention is not described with reference to any particular programming language. It will be appreciated that a variety of programming languages may be used to implement the teachings of the invention as described herein. Furthermore, it is common in the art to speak of software, in one form or another (e.g., program, procedure, process, application, module, logic . . . ), as taking an action or causing a result. Such expressions are merely a shorthand way of saying that execution of the software by a computer causes the processor of the computer to perform an action or a produce a result.
Referring first to
In an alternate embodiment also illustrated in
Turning now to
If the user wishes to add an image record to the pool, he/she inputs filtering criteria (block 411), which is used to retrieve a matching record front the Gallery (block 413). The appropriate information from the Gallery record is used to create a corresponding record in the image pool (block 421). As many additional matching records can be added by user as desired (block 423) or new filtering criteria can be input (block 425).
The blocks in phantom in
When the user wants to delete individual images from the pool, an identifier for the image record (e.g. the identifier for the item represented by the image) is obtained from the user (block 427). The corresponding image is then deleted from the pool (block 429). If there are more images to delete (block 431). the user is given the opportunity to input another image record identifier.
The pool may need to be purged of images periodically, such as when the items represented by the images are not longer available on the web site. The user inputs purging criteria (block 405) and administration tool method 400 identifies and deletes the matching records (block 407).
One of skill in the art will immediately appreciate that while the administration tool has been described as an interactive program, the method 400 is equally applicable to being executed as a batch program driven by a set of parameters previously input by a user.
The particular methods performed by computer implementing an embodiment of the gallery widget and gallery administration tool have been described. The method performed for the gallery widget has been shown by reference to flowcharts in
The following description of
The disk drive unit 516 represents non-volatile storage such as a magnetic hard disk, an optical disk, or another form of storage for large amounts of data, and includes a machine-readable medium 524 on which is stored a set of instructions (i.e., software) 526 embodying any one, or all, of the methodologies described above. The software 526 is also shown to reside, completely or at least partially, within the main memory 504 and/or within the processor 502 such as when it is written, often by a direct memory access process, into the main memory 504 during execution of the software by the processor 502. One of skill in the art will immediately recognize that the term “machine-readable medium” includes any type of storage device capable of storing or encoding a sequence of instructions for execution by the processor 502 that causes the machine to perform any one of the methodologies of the present invention. The term “machine-readable medium” (or “computer-readable”) shall accordingly be taken to include, but not be limited to, solid-state memories, optical and magnetic disks, and carrier wave signals that encode data signals such as when the software 526 is transmitted or received via the network interface device 522 from/to external systems.
It will be appreciated that the modem or network interface device 522 can be considered to be part of the computer system 500. This interface device 522 can be an analog modem, ISDN modem, cable modern, token ring interlace, satellite transmission interface (e.g. “Direct PC”), or other interfaces for coupling a computer system to other computer systems. The computer system 500 and the external systems can be connected in a local area network (LAN) configuration or in a wide-area network WAN configuration (generically represented as network 523). The LAN and WAN can be either public or private networks. One of the most widely used public WANs is the Internet. The term Internet as used heroin refers to a network of networks which uses certain protocols, such as the TCP/IP protocol, and possibly other protocols such as the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) for hypertext markup language (HTML) documents that make up the World Wide Web. The physical connections of the Internet and the protocols and communication procedures of the Internet are well known to those of skill in the art.
It will be appreciated that the computer system 500 is one example of many possible computer systems which have different architectures. For example, personal computers based on an Intel microprocessor often have multiple buses, one of which can be considered to be as peripheral bus. Network computers are another type of computer system that can be used with the present invention. Network computers do not usually include a hard disk or other mass storage, and the executable programs are loaded from a network connection into the memory 504 for execution by the processor 502. A Web TV system, which is known in the art, is also considered to be a computer system according to the present invention, but it may lack some of the features shown in
It will also be appreciated that the computer system 500 is controlled by operating system software which includes a file management system, such as a disk operating system, which is part of the operating system software, One example of an operating system software with its associated file management system software is the operating system known as Windows 95 from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., and its associated file management system. The file management system is typically stored in the non-volatile storage 516 and causes the processor 502 to execute the various acts required by the operating system to input and output data and to store data in memory, including storing files on the non-volatile storage 516.
A gallery widget that provides for the automatic selection and integration of images on markup language documents, such as web pages, has been described. In one aspect, the gallery widget selects the images from a gallery containing all the available images. In another aspect, a supporting gallery administration tool creates a pool of images from those in the gallery and the gallery widget selects the images for the web pages from the pool. Although specific embodiments have been illustrated and described herein, it will be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art that any arrangement which is calculated to achieve the same purpose may be substituted for the specific embodiments shown. This application is intended to cover any adaptations or variations of the present invention.
For example, one of skill in the art will immediately recognize that the invention is not limited to use with an auction web site as described herein, but is suitable for use on with any web-based business that requires a frequent rotation of images on its web site pages. Furthermore, although the invention has been described in conjunction with its use on the World Wide Web, it will be appreciated that the invention is equally applicable in any environment in which images are presented to a user in documents written in a markup language, and that the terminology used in this application is meant to include all environments that incorporate a markup language. Therefore, it is manifestly intended that this invention be limited only by the following claims and equivalents thereof.
This application is a continuation application of U.S. application Ser. No. 12/620,450, filed on Nov. 17, 2009, entitled “Dynamic Selection of Images for Web Pages,” which is a divisional application of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/589,585, filed on Jun. 7, 2000, entitled “Dynamic Selection of Images for Web Pages,” all of which applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 09589585 | Jun 2000 | US |
| Child | 12620450 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 12620450 | Nov 2009 | US |
| Child | 13717394 | US |
