As you can see in the chart below the summer and spring months performed very well. Due to the angle of our roof when the snow arrived in December energy production dropped to near zero, until it started melting in March. The most surprising thing to me was how much the heat in the summer impacted the panel’s energy production. Overall the system has performed 4% above the model.

In the past, I have usually done this for them. Using some program I convert the PDF to an image file and then upload both the PDF and image file. The tricky part is getting the image to link back to the PDF file. Not the most straightforward process.

This got me thinking that someone must have fixed this issue already. Here it is the PDF Image Generator plugin. It does exactly what you want. For the PDF below I simply uploaded it via the Add Media button and the plugin did all the heavy lifting. Amazing!

This can be done before images are uploaded to your site. Many programs have built in export capabilities that will handle the this for the user. However, for those less tech savvy people this can be a bit daunting.

WP Smush has been a great plugin for compressing images automatically on upload. Originally built to use the, now defunct, Yahoo Smush.It API, the new version uses the servers of the kind folks at WPMU DEV. I haven’t tried the pro version yet. The free version is much faster then the original. A bulk smush of 30 images took only a minute. By default it will compress images on upload to your site, so the user doesn’t need to remember to do it.

The compression works great. The two images below are the same image uploaded from my machine at 292 KB. One image is compressed the other isn’t. Can you tell the difference?

If you guessed the bottom image as being the compressed one then you have a keen eye. I picked an image that is challenge for compression. The light and shadows along with the lines of the lake and trees can reveal artifacts of the compression. I can only pick our a few things, nothing that your visitors will notice. Now how about size. The top image is still 292 KB and the bottom is now 48 KB less. While this doesn’t seem like a huge amount it is still 16% difference. With many images within a post the load time difference can be substantial. Give it a try on your site and let me know how it works for you.

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!