We wanted to start a new series of blog posts that involves everyone in our office. Because we all have different sets of skills and knowledge, the information we share may be beneficial or entertaining to others. So, keep an eye out for more of our ‘Shop Talk’ series.

What Is Your Favorite Source to Gather Inspiration?

Cody, SEO Specialist:

My most creative moments are born from discussions with other individuals. Websites developed for creative inspiration are great and all, but I truly enjoy a person-to-person discussion to find the inspiration I’m looking for. An intellectual conversation allows me to understand multiple perceptions about a certain topic.

Sean, Project Manager:

My most creative moments are in the bathtub… Well I’m a big guy so I’m never really in the bathtub, but anyway. I’m bombarded with information all day long whether it be thing I read or knowledge I learn from all of my very talented coworkers. It those quiet moments away from work and children that all that information solidifies and come together like a giant puzzle.

Chris, Lead Web Developer:

Often reading books on my kindle, stackexchange, instructional youtube videos, watching business oriented reality shows (e.g. shark tank) and reading code projects outside my domain can be the provenance of new found creativity for me.

Jonathan, Application Developer:

Music is one of my top inspirations. It isn’t so much that any specific music or artist makes ideas pop into my head; rather it puts me into a creative state of mind. I generally don’t like to work in silence, finding my work (whatever it may be) isn’t as strong as it would be otherwise. Another place I find inspiration is artwork, usually digital and concept art, cinematography, and graphic design. Something about striking visuals gets the gears in my head turning.

Kate, SEO Content Creator:

I find inspiration in documentaries. There is nothing like the realm of unscripted reality in the sense of exploration and narration. I feel passionate when I watch documentaries that invite in a motivation to see how others live and work outside my world.

Damon, Online Traffic Strategist:

Ultimately, while many forms of media and people feed my subconscious and provide the fodder for my imagination, my favorite and most tapped source to gather inspiration is my children. My 3 yr old sees the world in a way I once did, unfiltered and pure. Whether it’s the drive to meet a deadline, the seed that blossoms into my next great idea or the ever present reminder of my duty as role model, my children both inspire me in ways I never thought possible and serve as my inspiration in nearly all things I do.

We recently had an issue where one of our inboxes was nearly full. So we reached out and did some research to find the best method of reliably backing up a Gmail inbox and clearing it. We found that the best method is with getmail, a Linux utility that fetches mail through IMAP. It is very powerful and flexible, providing a lot of options. There are several different methods as well (outlined below).

Overall, we recommend using getmail. By trying several different approaches, getmail is by far the best. It is a little confusing at first, but not a hard pill to swallow:

How do you install getmail?

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd getmail4

Arch Linux:

pacman -S getmail

Centos:

yum install getmail*

Here are some resources for backing up gmail with Linux:
getmail:

• Matt Cutts explains how to backup gmail with getmail 
• Linode documentation goes over getmail setup
• Getmail documentation
• Configuring getmail

If you don’t like getmail there are several different options out there:
BagoMa:

• Ebixio blog explains how to back up gmail with bagoma
• Bagoma documentation

Fetchmail:

• Life hacker explains how to backup gmail with fetchmail
• Periodically backing up your email with fetchmail

W4RJ8XDCJ8DS

This is just a compilation of our favorite #drupalcon tweets through out drupalcon denver thus far. Some tweets are big news for the drupal community!

• Video of Fabien Potencier, founder of symfony. He explains in the session why drupal is using some key symfony components. https://twitter.com/#!/jedihe/status/182652246356525056
• Drupalicon needs a patch https://twitter.com/#!/mu5a5hi_jeff/status/182600561659617280
• Good morning denver bear! https://twitter.com/#!/bronicat/status/182454208665108480
• Drupal 8 + drupalcon 2013 in PDX! https://twitter.com/#!/eizzumdm/status/182245242764935170 https://twitter.com/#!/robeson/status/182248282368647171
  Live pdx 2013 site is here: http://t.co/YN6RWY7s
• Drupal poetry project by our fellow texan drupalists, four kitchens: http://t.co/Dl6HAwFN

Here are some nuggets of information from the second day:

• The marriage between symfony and drupal 8 is very exciting. It allows drupal to be compatible and interopable with other symfony projects
• View modes is the best practice before modifying the template file because that is the new drupal way
• The risks of non PCI compliance are fatal to businesses. Risks include lawsuits, loss of reputation, etc. It is something in the commerce field that shouldn’t be ignored
• Entities is the new future of drupal. Entities are used already largely in Drupal 7 with several modules: profile2, drupal commerce, etc
• Changing your innodb pool size can quickly increase your performance
• Make sure to utilize db query debugging in views it’ll allow you to quickly find slow query performance
• the views mini pager is one of the largest bottle necks when it comes to views output.
• entities allows drupal to have a unified crud controller.
• entities enables drupal to be flexible and interopable with other databases as well.
• each entity contains an id, crud controller and a property. The property contains meta data that ertains to the actual entity
• in drupal 7, entity bundles were introduced. entity bundles are things like: vocabularies, content types. Comments and users are possibly going to be slowly migrated to an entity bundle

Some a random list of things we’ve learned at Drupalcon:

• As always live demos can sometimes fail; regardless if you practice the night before
• Mobile will eclipse and be larger than desktop devices
• Panels will be integrated into core with the new intiative, Blocks and Layouts Everywhere
• Web services will be more and more important as the demand for native mobile apps are needed
• WSSCI is deprecated, part of it will be split up. The larger initiative of creating a communication layer, with the http foundation kernal
• The CMI initiative will not likely be completed in the drupal 8 in core.
• Drupal 7 approaching maturity as drupal 6 is near it’s end of it’s cycle
• Android devices internationally will reach 50% market share by 2015