The International Education Statistics blog was started in 2005. Since then, the format has been repeatedly modified and additional features were added. For example, in December 2010, a mobile version of the blog was launched. In 2012, the site will again be revised and some upcoming changes are summarized below.
1. Merger of huebler.info and huebler.blogspot.com
Until last year, I maintained two websites: the International Education Statistics blog at huebler.blogspot.com (Figure 1), and a separate website at huebler.info (Figure 2). The latter was mainly a mirror of articles posted on the blog, presented in a simpler format. For the reasons outlined below, I will close the site at huebler.info in the second quarter of 2012 and redirect all requests for huebler.info to huebler.blogspot.com. During the transition phase, new articles will only be posted on this blog.
Figure 1: Screenshot of huebler.blogspot.com
Figure 2: Screenshot of huebler.info
The simple site at huebler.info had one potential advantage: individual pages contained less HTML code and took less time to load on slow Internet connections. The blog at huebler.blogspot.com, on the other hand, offered several convenient features not available on the other site, including a site search and a labeling system, that make it easy to find content of interest. Perhaps because of this, the number of visitors to huebler.blogspot.com was far greater than the number of visitors to huebler.info.
Given the lack of features and the relatively low number of visitors of the current huebler.info site, I have decided to focus my efforts fully on the blog. If you currently have pages at huebler.info bookmarked, please replace those bookmarks by the relevant pages at huebler.blogspot.com; links to the latter are shown on the bottom of nearly every page at huebler.info. For example, a recent article on school attendance by grade and age in Liberia at http://huebler.info/2011/20110731-liberia.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/07/liberia.html. The guide to integrating Stata and external text editors at http://huebler.info/2008/20080427-stata.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2008/04/stata.html. After the shutdown of the current huebler.info site, all requests for huebler.info will lead to huebler.blogspot.com; any links to other huebler.info pages will seize to function. If you encounter a broken huebler.info link, please email me and I will send you the corresponding URL on the blog. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
2. New labeling system
All articles on the International Education Statistics blog are tagged with keywords or labels, listed at the bottom of each page, that can be used to find related articles. In May 2006, I began using Delicious to label and bookmark all posts. As an example, see this Delicious page with all articles about India on huebler.blogspot.com. In September 2011, after Delicious had been acquired by a new owner, the underlying software was modified and several features, including a tag cloud that I had used on my blog, were disabled. I therefore switched to the labeling system of Blogger. As an example, here is a link to all of my blog articles about India. I have not removed my bookmarks from Delicious but am no longer updating them.
3. Bigger images
The International Education Statistics blog is formatted to fit on displays with a width of 1024 pixels. To avoid overlap with the sidebar on the right of the page, tables and graphs were limited to a maximum width of about 650 pixels. Beginning in 2012, I will occasionally use images that can be enlarged. Below is an example from an article on School attendance by grade and age in Liberia of July 2011. The original graph had a fixed size and could not be enlarged. By contrast, clicking on the graph below will bring up a larger image that adjusts to the size of the display, up to a width of 1600 pixels.
Figure 3: Age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia, 2007
Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.
To summarize, I hope that these changes will make the International Education Statistics blog more user-friendly. If you encounter any problems with the revised design or if you have any other comments, please send me an email or post a comment below.
Friedrich Huebler, 31 January 2012 (edited 1 February 2012), Creative Commons LicensePermanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/01/website.html
