I’ve found various options with Thunderbird and Mac Mail. But all require to play with the off-line or sync features. Also I needed something that I could run from the backup server without moving 25GB of email from one computer to another. After couple queries in google, I found a good solution which was using getmail to retrieve emails from POP Gmail accounts.

So, here it is. Please remember to activate POP or IMAP feature in your Gmail account settings before start.

1. Install getmail

2. Create a folder and file to store the emails

3. Create getmail folder and config file and add settings

** Please check references links below for more info about other options.

4. start backup, sit back and relax

I’m using -d here because I don’t need to keep those email account anymore. So you will need to remove it if you’re planning to continue using the account.

That’s all, add the command to a cronjob and you are all set.

References:
http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/

http://blog.pengdeng.com/2008/03/backup-gmail-via-imap-using-getmail_16.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/

1. A MAC with OS X 10.5

Well to start I use a MAC BOOK PRO with OS X 10.5.7. This laptop has been with me for over a year and a half and is still as fast as the first time I turned it on.

2. Firefox 3.5B99 (yes the BETA versions, helping the community to debug)

In my point of view, this browser is the best out there. I’ve been using it since Mozilla started developing it.

2.1. Firefox Plug-ins

• Web developer toolbar
• Firebug

2. Parallels 4.0

Well, since most of you out there still using Internet Explorer 6,7 and hopefully 8. My projects need to be “re-created” so they work on those versions of Internet Explorer, and to make sure that’s the case I have a copy of Windows XP running with Parallels. That’s why I’m giving the credit to Parallels and not Windows.

3. Cyberduck

So far, its been working great this little yellow duck. Not just capable of connecting to my S3 account, but making SFTP and  regular FTP connections to my hosting and client’s hosting servers.

4. iTerm

Well iTerm is another MAC OS X tool that I keep it handy in my dock. I’m not sure if I’ve told you but I do a lot of LINUX admin at work, at home, etc. So if you like to get into the command line and play with your fav *nix distro and why not you MAC as well. I would recommend iTerm.

5. Mail/Ical ( not a development tool, but comes handy to keep organized)

Of course I use them to get data out of my GMAIL/CALENDAR  accounts, but they do their work. Helping me to schedule meetings, reminders, etc.

6. Zend Studio

Zend, it’s been in my tool box since version 1. It is by far one of the best IDE out there that works for MAC, WINDOWS and best of all, LINUX.

With Zend I can keep my projects organized, connect via SFTP or FTP, use the subversion feature when I don’t use the command line and also the auto-complete.

Those are my TOP 5. Probably I will write more about each one and how I use them in my next blogs.

For now. Happy summer.

So, Twitter offer in its documentation something like this…. ” Post a status update and get the resulting status back as JSON: curl -u username:password -d status=”your message here” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json “

With this in mind we will be building our twitter_it() function.

Please remember to make the necessary validations and checks. This is just a simple example to demonstrate the the usage of the Twitter API.

<?php
/**
* This function will send a new status to your Twitter account
* Usage: twitter_it(“message goes here”);
*
* @param string $new_status
*/
function twitter_it($new_status = NULL) {

//TWITTER API URL
$twitter_url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json”;
//Initiate curl
$curlh = curl_init();

//Post fields in a array
$data = array (“status” => $new_status);
//Set curl options.
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_URL, $twitter_url);
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “<user>:<pass>”);
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
//Excute curl with options
curl_exec($curlh);
//Close connection.
curl_close($curlh);

}

?>

If there is other way to do it. I’ll be glad to know and maybe enhance this one.

For example, lets say a T-Shirt site, they usually have a bunch of designs or products related to a certain content. If your PHP code is generating these images or grabbing them from a Database (files names usually come from a Database), you probably want to take advantage of that by adding to the ALT tag the title of the product. This also accomplish two things: a) If user has a slow down in his connection he will see the product name until the image loads, making it easy for them to recognize what the product image is about, and of course b) to help with your positioning in the search results.

So, just make sure the code looks like this < img src = “/folder/your-image-name.jpg” alt = “Talk nerdy to me” >. Oh, almost forgot, to those who love Internet Explorer, you might want to include the TITLE tag as well.

If you are interested on how to do it, check apache mod-rewrite or you can read more about how to do “Friendly URLS with PHP” at “The html blog“