Website changes in 2012

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 License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/01/website.html

Mobile version of International Education Statistics blog

The International Education Statistics blog is now available in a version formatted for mobile devices. If you access the blog on an iPhone, Android phone or similar device, the site will be displayed differently. The navigation bar, the tags and other elements are removed, graphs are reformatted to fit the smaller screen of mobile devices, and navigation is simplified. The mobile version of the blog can be viewed at http://huebler.blogspot.com/?m=1. The bottom of each page on the mobile version has a link to the web version of the blog.

Screenshot of mobile version of blog


Related articles

• New blog feature: Subject labels
• Blog categories

Friedrich Huebler, 17 December 2010 (edited 18 December 2010), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2010/12/mobile.html

Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey blog

The Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) are household surveys carried out in developing countries with the support of UNICEF to collect data on the situation of children and women. The most recent round of MICS surveys was conducted between 2005 and 2007 in more than 40 countries. MICS data and documentation are available at the Childinfo website of UNICEF.

MICS surveys are among the sources of data analyzed on this site. MICS data were used in articles on trends in primary education in Nepal, children out of school in India, child labor and school attendance in Bolivia, education disparity trends in South Asia, global data on child labor and school attendance, household wealth and years of education, the link between years of schooling and literacy, and other studies.

UNICEF staff members working on the MICS have launched a new blog at globalmics.blogspot.com. The goal of the blog is "to facilitate information sharing between different organizations and individuals involved with MICS implementation around the world" and "to play the role of an unofficial, informal forum to share information on MICS activities." Articles posted since the launch have treated a variety of topics, among them acronyms and abbreviations related to MICS, members of the global MICS team, and the evaluation of the latest round of MICS.

External links

• MICS For All: A Blog Site for Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys
• Childinfo: Monitoring the Situation of Children and Women (UNICEF)

Related articles

• Nepal: trends in primary education, 1980-2004
• India has 21 million children out of school
• Child labor and school attendance in Bolivia
• Education disparity trends in South Asia
• Child labor and school attendance
• Household wealth and years of education
• Years of schooling and literacy: Can everyone with primary education read and write?

Friedrich Huebler, 23 November 2008, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2008/11/mics.html

New blog feature: Subject labels

All articles on my blog on education statistics are now labeled with keywords. This feature was introduced with a new version of Blogger, launched on 19 December 2006. Clicking on a label leads to a page containing all posts with the particular label (example: all posts labeled "India"). In addition, I continue to use del.icio.us tags for all posts on the blog, as described in my article on blog categories. I also added the backlinks feature of Blogger that provides a list of links to an article.

Links:

• Article on blog categories
• List of blog articles and tags on del.icio.us
  

Friedrich Huebler, 1 January 2007 (edited 27 January 2007), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-blog-feature-subject-labels.html

Blog categories

Starting today, all articles on this blog are organized into categories that are listed in the sidebar. This should make it easier for readers to find articles that interest them. Blogger, the host of my blog, is a powerful and flexible service but one feature is missing: it offers no way to organize posts by category. To find an article on India, for example, readers of this blog had to do a search or browse the archives. [Update December 2006: Blogger has introduced label management. See below for more information.]

Recently I discovered that blog categories can be implemented with the help of del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service. An article on Blogger Tips and Tricks describes an easy method to add categories to a blog. The steps are summarized below, for a detailed description please read the article Creating categories step-by-step.

• Create a del.icio.us account that will be used only for your blog.
• Add a del.icio.us bookmarklet or extension to your browser.
• Log in with the new del.icio.us account name.
• Bookmark all individual entries from your blog, or at least the most important ones. The tags are the categories that will be listed in the blog sidebar. In contrast to the guide at Blogger Tips and Tricks, I suggest starting with the oldest posts because this ensures that del.icio.us lists the newest posts first, similar to how they appear in your blog. I accomplished this by going to the monthly archives (beginning with the oldest posts), calling up the individual post pages by clicking on the date stamp at the bottom of each article, and tagging each page with del.icio.us.
• Go to the help section on the del.icio.us site and select the Tag Rolls section under Blog Integration.
• Customize the appearance of the tag list and copy the code at the bottom of the tag rolls page.
• Log in to your Blogger account and paste the code to the sidebar section of the template.
• Save the template and republish the blog.

The result can be seen in the sidebar of my blog, under the heading Categories. I selected a simple list with article count when I customized the tag roll, other options include a tag cloud and varying font size and color depending on the number of articles within each category. Clicking on a keyword, for example India, brings up a del.icio.us page with all articles from my blog that are filed under the respective category, with the most recent articles at the top. The complete list of tags for each article is also shown.

The tag roll code by del.icio.us creates links in colors that vary with the number of articles within each category. I had selected black for all links on the tag roll customization page. This yields a code that contains the part color=000000-000000, where 000000 stands for black (see this RGB color palette). The first number is the color of categories with the smallest number of articles, the second number the color of categories with the highest number of articles. I changed this part to color=114488-114488, which makes all links appear in blue. I have not found a way to underline the links or to change the font of the categories so that they match the rest of my blog.

Update 27 December 2006: Blogger introduced label management to a new beta version of its blogging service in October 2006 (read the announcement on Blogger Buzz). After the new version of Blogger was launched on 19 December 2006 (announcement on Blogger Buzz) I began using the new label feature for my posts. Blogger labels are now listed under each post. Clicking on a label leads to a page containing all posts with the particular label (example: all posts labeled "India"). However, I continue to list the del.icio.us tag roll in the side bar of my blog because it offers certain advantages. The main advantage of the del.icio.us tag roll is that it brings up a comprehensive list of all articles in a certain category, showing only the title and tags (example: all posts tagged "India"). I find this list easier to navigate than a page with complete articles. On the other hand, Blogger labels make it easy to combine all posts on a particular topic on a single page for printing or archiving. To be consistent, I use the same keywords to label articles in Blogger and del.icio.us.

Friedrich Huebler, 29 May 2006 (edited 27 March 2007), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2006/05/blog-categories.html

About this blog

This blog offers analysis of international education statistics, with a focus on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Readers will find data on primary and secondary education, gender disparity, trends from 1980 to the present, and country studies. Occasionally there will also be advice on the use of the Stata statistical package. To contact the author, write to fhuebler@gmail.com.

Friedrich Huebler, 28 February 2005, Creative Commons License