WordPress 3.9 “Smith” has arrived, bringing with it a new visual editor to WordPress. The WordPress admin UI has always been one of WordPress’ big advantages over other CMS platforms. This sets the bar even higher. My thanks to the entire WordPress team who have put out another great release which will be sure to keep WordPress at the top of the CMS list.
Jamas
Which Country Won The 2014 Winter Olympics?
With the current situation in Ukraine this post seems a little silly, but I don’t have anything to add to that discussion, other then to just shake my head at how as a species we behave.
With that out of the way, who won the 2014 Winter Olympics. The answer of course is which every country is at the top of the list when you rank countries on some scheme that gets your home country highest in the rankings. The answer in all cases I can think of is Russia. They had an amazing result at their home Olympics, which really can’t be diminished by any of the judging scandals. It was a big turn around for a nation that was looking for answers after the 2010 games in Vancouver.
Here is the ranking system I like the most. It assigns each medal a point value: Gold 3 points; Silver 2 points; Bronze 1 point. It rewards countries that had the most first place finishes and gives credit for those who made it to the podium. It also rewards countries that sweep the podium at an event, which there were several in this Olympics. Here are the results for the top few countries. Guess which is my home country! 🙂
| Country | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total | Points |
| Russia | 13 | 11 | 9 | 33 | 70 |
| Canada | 10 | 10 | 5 | 25 | 55 |
| Norway | 11 | 5 | 10 | 26 | 53 |
| USA | 9 | 7 | 12 | 28 | 53 |
| Netherlands | 8 | 7 | 9 | 24 | 47 |
| Germany | 8 | 6 | 5 | 19 | 41 |
| Switzerland | 6 | 3 | 2 | 11 | 26 |
WordPress 3.8
WordPress 3.8 “Parker” has arrived, bringing with it a new, slick, UI for WordPress. The WordPress admin UI has always been one of WordPress’ big advantages over other CMS platforms. This sets the bar even higher. My thanks to the entire WordPress team who have put out another great release which will be sure to keep WordPress at the top of the CMS list.
WordPress 3.7
WordPress 3.7 “Basie” has arrived. This brings a big update for updates! Going forward updates to the WordPress core will automatically be done. This is sure to help with some of the WordPress security issue of site owners not applying updates. My thanks to the entire WordPress team who have put out another great release – only two months after the last one – which will be sure to keep WordPress at the top of the CMS list.
Tracking Real User Website Load Times
One thing I have been struggling with lately is making WordPress websites load faster of our VPS. Still working on things go faster but thought I would mention a tool that I have been using on my personal site for a while. The tool is called Pingdom, which I have have been using for a few years to monitor uptime on the website. They have added a new tool called the Real User Monitor which with a bit of code added to your template’s header.php file will show you load times for visitors to your site. This is great because it gives you real visitor information and not just a test machine accessing your site. The key to making anything faster is having an accurate measurement of speed so you can tell if you are making things better.