Digital Magazine Server Feed Formatting and Validation

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Solution Overview

Problem

Digital magazine servers face inefficiencies in formatting content items from diverse sources, as they often require time-consuming comparisons of content item portions to formatting rules, leading to incompatible formats and user inconvenience.

Innovation Solution

The digital magazine server applies formatting rules to content items, generating results that indicate compatibility and provide recommended modifications, allowing users to easily modify content items to meet formatting constraints, thereby ensuring consistent presentation across multiple sources.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Adaptability or versatility

If sources provide content items in different formats, then content diversity is improved, but formatting compatibility deteriorates

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecontent diversityVSAvoidformatting compatibility
Core Design Contradiction:
Adaptability or versatilityVSReliability

Solution Approach 1:

The system performs preliminary formatting validation by applying formatting rules to content items before they are fully processed and presented. This advance checking identifies formatting issues early, allowing sources to correct problems before content integration, thus maintaining compatibility without restricting format diversity.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The system provides feedback to sources about formatting violations by returning results that indicate which content items fail to meet formatting rules. This feedback loop enables sources to adjust their content output to achieve better compatibility while maintaining their own formatting flexibility.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #23Feedback

2Manufacturing precision

If sources compare content items to formatting rules, then formatting precision is improved, but processing time increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improveformatting precisionVSAvoidprocessing time
Core Design Contradiction:
Manufacturing precisionVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The system extracts and applies only the necessary formatting rules to specific portions of content items that need validation. Rather than comparing entire content items against all formatting rules, the system selectively applies rules to relevant elements, reducing processing overhead while maintaining formatting precision.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #2Taking out (Extraction)

Solution Approach 2:

The system applies formatting rules partially by focusing on critical formatting aspects that affect compatibility, rather than exhaustively checking every possible formatting attribute. This selective approach achieves sufficient formatting precision without the full time cost of complete validation.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #16Partial or excessive action

3Stability of the object's composition

If formatting rules are strictly enforced, then presentation consistency is improved, but source flexibility deteriorates

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvepresentation consistencyVSAvoidsource flexibility
Core Design Contradiction:
Stability of the object's compositionVSAdaptability or versatility

Solution Approach 1:

By validating formatting beforehand and providing feedback to sources, the system allows sources to maintain their formatting flexibility while ensuring that content items meet consistency requirements before integration. Sources can experiment with different formats knowing they will receive specific feedback about compliance.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

Sources serve themselves by using the formatting feedback to automatically adjust their content output. The system provides the rules and validation results, enabling sources to independently resolve formatting issues without rigid enforcement, thus preserving source flexibility while achieving presentation consistency.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #25Self-service

Data Source

PatentUS9979774B2Debugging and formatting feeds for presentation based on elements and content items
Publication Date: 2018.05.22 FLIPBOARD INC
  • US9979774B2 patent drawing
  • US9979774B2 patent drawing
  • US9979774B2 patent drawing

AI summary

A digital magazine server receives feeds of content items from various sources and formats content items from the feed for presentation in a digital magazine. The digital magazine server determines whether the content items from the feed satisfy one or more rules specifying presentation of content items by the digital magazine server. Content items from a feed are compared to the one or more rules to generate results specifying whether various content items satisfy one or more of the rules. To simplify review of the content items, results are grouped for each content item to allow the source of the feed to individually edit the content items to comply with the one or more rules.