Little did we know, he had. Or at least his WordPress VIP elf helped the big guy out. We are thrilled to be one of only 10 national WordPress VIP Featured Partners and thoroughly enjoy working with the team at WordPress VIP. To work so closely with the team that has revolutionized how websites are built is a dream come true for us.

We were very excited to try the assortment of goodies from locally-owned New England treateries and thought the cookie bearing the WordPress logo was a super cool touch. The WordPress sticker was a quick favorite, promptly being snatched up by co-founder/WordPress fanatic/Amazon-addict Jayson. This was by far our coolest Christmas treat so far.

So, WordPress VIP, not only are we thankful for the thoughtful (and tasty) gift, we are truly grateful for all you do for the hacker community and businesses around the world. Without your vision and hard work, the web wouldn’t be what it is today.

The post A Special Delivery From WordPress VIP appeared first on inSourceCode.

How do you break through the monotony?  Where can you find inspiration? And more importantly, how do you remember to keep finding it?

As a designer, creator and communicator, your best work happens when the concept and creative process inspire and challenge you.  Below are a few tips that you can insert into your daily, weekly or monthly schedule to keep you thinking, inspired, and excited for each new design challenge:

1. Find Your Morning Cup of Joe.
   There is a whole world of design blogs, trends and how-tos out there. You may have to put on your Sherlock Holmes hat at first, but once you find your inspiration sources, sign up for their updates.  They’ll be waiting in your inbox to inspire you each morning, like a good cup of morning Joe.
2. Before you hit the “GO” button …
   It’s easy to take your manager or creative director’s direction and hit ‘go.’ But how often do you stop and ask yourself, “Is this the best way to represent the information?” Sometimes, it may be. In those instances where it may not, it’s a chance to stretch your visual communication legs, think critically, and come up with a different solution. Then take that idea or two and pitch to your uppers. Whether or not you curve the direction of the end product, you’ve shown that you are an active part of the intelligent creative process and are dedicated to the best end-product possible. Not to mention challenging your problem solving skills along the way.
3. Change Your View
   A change of environment can work wonders on a creative brain. If you find yourself stuck or drained, ask your boss if you can work from another location for a few hours, whether that be your local book or coffee shop, or another favorite location. The act of getting up and moving will get your body working again, stimulating your brain and your concentration.
4. Meetup
   So, you’re not the most social creature. Or, maybe you are, but you are busy. No excuses. Look up design Meetups, put on your grownup pants and try some out. “What’s a ‘Meetup’?” you ask? Take a look at Wikipedia’s definition of a Meetup.  You don’t have to be a social butterfly to reap the benefits of meeting with other creatives. You may even prefer to meet with others that are not in your exact design area. Brainstorm, share thoughts, bounce ideas, discuss trends, and most importantly, have that connection available to you.

Do you have any daily, weekly or monthly tips you use to stay inspired and creative? Send them my way, I’d love to hear them.

The post Finding Your Inspiration appeared first on inSourceCode.

If you’re not sure who’s on the team, check out A Week of Thanksgiving: Part 1. From the entire team at inSourceCode, Happy Thanksgiving (and be safe if you’re braving Black Friday)

The post A Week of Thanksgiving: Food Edition appeared first on inSourceCode.

So, grab a cup o’ joe, sit back and enjoy the read.

10. We are so grateful for all of the many mentors and advisers who have helped steer us on this fun path we call inSourceCode. Our friends at RareBird helped us get our feet when we first started the company a couple years ago and have remained a fantastic sounding board of advise ever since. Thank you.

We’re also thankful for the quiet, constant mentors we have in our families (wait, I promised this wasn’t about personal thankfulness. Oh well.) Each momma, pops, sister, brother and papaw helped inspire and steer us personally to achieve great things and push forward which in turn, pushed inSourceCode forward. Thank you.

Most recently, we’ve been blessed by the friendship and support of our friends at Imavex. Plus, it’s pretty cool to be right next door to their team and to have been able to partner on some streaming video projects via their Streamotor technology.

9. We are also extremely grateful for all of our wonderful vendors (we like to call them friends). Tommy Rector and his team at Rector Communications always make sure we have the coolest stuff (uh, we gave away iPhone speakers at a conference recently) that truly fit with the personality of our company. Thank you!

The team at WordPress is amazing to work with. Such a fun group of people with such giving spirits and we are fortunate to be able to play in their successful space. Thank you!

There are also a few really cool tools that we use on a daily basis to make doing our jobs easier. We don’t necessarily interact with the folks at these companies on a regular basis but we sure do appreciate what they do. We love Teambox for helping us to manage our projects on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. It’s pretty cool to be able to store all of our outstanding to-dos, client files and chat conversations in one place. We also love Harvest. Just in case you missed it, we did a blog post about why we love Harvest last week. Next, we’re thankful for locally-owned Tinderbox. This software allows us to create proposals quickly and efficiently but the really cool part is that we can monitor who reads the proposal and which pages they spend the most time on. This makes our proposal writing process more and more refined based on what clients are actually interested in. Thank you!

8. We are very thankful for a short work week! This week, in addition to the normal Thanksgiving and Black Friday holidays, we all were able to work from home today (thank you Matt and Jayson!). So team, as I sit at my dining room table, sipping a cup of hot tea writing this post, I hope you are all still sitting comfortably in your pajamas, working away on your laptops on the sofa.

Unfortunately, the fall flu bug has attacked several members of our team. Thinking of you today Katie, Chris and Kelly. (PS. I’ve had my fly-swatter out the past week chasing the flu bug, too. Luckily, I’m on the mend – Allison)

7. We are also thankful for new office space! Over the summer we were fortunate to move from two tiny leased offices crammed full of Ikea desks laden with monitor after monitor, a dorm-size refrigerator, a water machine, 5 whiteboards, two TVs, and a printer or two into our awesome new space complete with plenty of room for our team, an inSourceCode Pop-A-Shot, and a conference room (complete with a ping pong conference table). Wow, what a welcomed change! (Here are some photos from our open house concert event)

6. Number 6 is something that can be very difficult to find and we are very thankful for it. At inSourceCode we have an office culture that everyone loves. We do a lot of big things at inSourceCode but every once in a while, you just need 5 minutes (or a game of ping pong, or a candy bar, or a 60-second lightening round of see-how-many-baskets-you-can-make on the Pop-A-Shot) to clear your mind. Not only do we work hard and play hard, we genuinely love and care about each other (queue the sappy music).

Each time a new person joins the inSourceCode team, we have a team lunch and have an informal game of 20-questions with the new employee. Then after they’ve been thoroughly humiliated, we all share a little bit about ourselves, too. This is just one small thing that helps build a culture that is truly irreplaceable and for that, the entire team says “Thank you”.

5. It’s really fun to have a chance to make a difference in our nation’s capitol. This summer, we moved our buddy Chris out to DC and he’s been doing a great job networking and representing inSourceCode in Washington, D.C. We’ve been privileged to work on some pretty cool projects and meet some pretty cool folks out there. Thank you to everyone who has made that possible!

4. It’s pretty cool when you can say you are one of 7 WordPress VIP Featured Partners in the entire nation. We have worked hard and proven that we know how to do big things with WordPress so, just a few short months ago, when WordPress VIP announced their list of Featured Partners, we were honored to be on that very short list. Thank you, VIP!

3. Where would we be without our clients? Answer: Gone. Special thanks to each and every company that trusts us to design their websites, configure their servers and/or provide server administration, and who outsource their entire web development needs to our company. We wouldn’t be who we are today without the trust you have put in our company. Thank you! (Check out some of our awesome clients)

2. As we are getting closer to the end of our top ten list, we wanted to bring it closer to home. We are extremely thankful for the Indy Community. The local news has been great about covering some of our recent successes. We’ve also been fortunate to join up with some pretty cool groups like Verge, TechPoint, Powderkeg, and WordPress Meetups.

Personally, I’m also thankful for our local Indy restaurant scene where we can have great, local breakfast and lunch meetings (like the delicious Jockamo Pizza, great sushi at 45 Degrees on the hip Mass Ave, and one of our favorite breakfast spots Best Bet). Thank you, Indy for being so awesome!

1. Last but not least, we are thankful for WordPress. Our company is built around developing on the WordPress platform. The WordPress community is a pretty cool place where developers create life-changing plugins and larger-than-life themes are created from some of the coolest designs around. We love WordPress. Thank you!

That’s our list of Top 10 Things We are Thankful for. We’d love to hear yours!

The post A Week of Thanksgiving - Part II: inSourceCode's Top 10 appeared first on inSourceCode.

This started a landslide of email echoes across the entire team stating why each of us appreciated one another so much. Here are a few tidbits into the personalities and lives of the inSourceCode team:

The post A Week of Thanksgiving – Part 1 appeared first on inSourceCode.

It is estimated that the single-page site chocked full of the latest breaking conservative news gets 3 million visits a day. When a site gets a backlink from DrudgeReport.com, the sheer volume of traffic can cause the servers to become overloaded and crash.

Enter: inSourceCode’s DrudgeProof.

The post Thank You, Matt Drudge appeared first on inSourceCode.

It’s quotes like these that greet the team at inSourceCode each and every morning when they log into Harvest to begin writing the day’s chapter of remarkable. You see, what allows inSourceCode to operate so efficiently is the fact that we track everything. No, not just online. Our employees keep a careful log of what they spend their time on day in and day out.

“Wow, that seems like overkill,” one might initially think. Actually, it allows the management team to see which types of projects cause the most hiccups. Then, we can steer new training initiatives and better quote projects in the future.

Enough about us. Here’s our take on Harvest.

The stats (taken from the Harvest “About” page).

• Recommended by 98% of our customers according to a recent customer survey
• 99.9% uptime so we are there when you need us
• Over $1,312,030,063 in invoices sent and paid through Harvest
• Over 122,006,833 hours tracked

PS They have an iPhone app that is amazing!

Why it’s part of our ninja toolbox. First off, let me say that we have used multiple time-tracking tools and like most small businesses, have had times that we guessed where we spent our time. Harvest made the cut because:

• The interface is drop-dead simple. Click the “+” sign, select a project, select a task, and hit go. Everyone on our team uses Harvest and never once have we had a new hire ask questions about how to use Harvest.
• Managing projects is simple. We have lots of clients and multiple projects for each client going on at any one time so our time tracking tool had to account for all of that. Harvest allows us to set up projects under each client and it auto-fills each project based on our standard tasks. What that means for us: setting up a new project takes less than 30 seconds. Harvest that.
• Reporting. Reporting. Reporting. Am I the only one who loves a good report in the morning? Ah, nothing like being able to see what’s going on across the company with project, task or employee level detail. What I like even more – THEY’RE CLICKABLE. Yup, just click on the project and see which tasks took the most time. Or, click on an employee and see what specifically they got accomplished on the task.
• Built-in invoicing. This works especially nice for clients that you have an hourly arrangement with. Each task can be set as “billable” or “non-billable” and then have an hourly rate associated with it. So, at the end of the month, simply run a report for all time spent on that project and create an invoice right there in Harvest.

We’ve almost pulled our hair out because… This section is much shorter (otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post) but here are a few things that would make Harvest a little better for us.

• A More Detailed Dashboard. While the “Reporting” function of Harvest is very good, the dashboard, for our purposes, leaves us a little underwhelmed. We’d love to see the top 5 clients we’ve spent time on this week. It would also be nice to see the top 5 tasks for the week (if it’s Admin, that’s a problem). It would also be nice to see how many billable hours have been worked this week/month. As a small business, knowing where we are on billable hours is a must.
• Tasks and Invoices. A couple times we had to back-track on the invoicing side of things and it was a nightmare trying to determine what had been invoiced and what had not. NOTE: This was about 6 months ago and either we are using the system better, there has been an update to the way invoices work, or maybe even both. At any rate, this isn’t as big of an issue as it once was.

Tracking time is essential to the success of our company. Do you use a time-tracking tool at your company. If so, what do you use? We’d also love to hear your experience.

The post Tools of the Trade: Harvest appeared first on inSourceCode.

So we go with that.

In addition to beautiful enterprise-level sites, we build web applications that make life easier and more enjoyable.

The point of this blog is not to get you all excited about changing the world (although that would be ok, too). The point is to introduce our very first fully-developed, spit-shined application, VolunteerYourVoice.

If you are familiar with our roots here at inSourceCode, you know we have several clients in the political space. VolunteerYourVoice was created to make life easier for some of our those folks. Getting in touch with and educating members of precincts or voter areas is critical to the furtherance of a campaign’s platform and ultimately, their success. The bad news for our clients was that the technology used to connect with their constituents via phone was completely outdated.

When we saw the huge need among our clients, we said, “we can make something better.” So we did.

VolunteerYourVoice allows organizations to empower volunteers to make phone calls on their behalf from anywhere. Phone calls are made via VoIP technology from any computer with Internet access or through mobile devices. The revolutionary part of the product is the fact that there are no limitations to the amount of data you can integrate into the campaign or the types of questions you can ask. To date, open-ended questions have been impossible. VolunteerYourVoice collects data inputs and reports on that data in real-time.

We launched VolunteerYourVoice beta at the Innovation Showcase here in Indianapolis in July. Then, a couple months later, we introduced the product in Washington, D.C. We are honored to have recently been featured in the Indianapolis Business Journal for the forward-thinking vision of our product.

The great news is this isn’t our last application! There are several in the works with two or three others set to launch very soon. Stay tuned.

The post inSourceCode gives political organizations a voice appeared first on inSourceCode.

We’ve broken it down by national chains, local Indy hot spots right here in our backyard and DC favorites, our other backyard.

National deals:

• Free Indivisible wristband at Starbucks
• Free taco at California Tortilla
• Free bagel and shmear at Einstein Bros with “I Voted” sticker
• Free appetizer with “I voted” sticker at Tijuana Flats
• Free Chips and Guac at Taco Bueno
• Free LEGO Turkey mini model build for kids at Lego Stores
• Two-for-one  lunch deal and then $5 off or $10 off Famiglia Meals (their meals to go for dinner). PS. Don’t forget, you need to use the coupons.
• FREE sopapillas at On the Border
• FREE small Sweet Potato Waffle Fry at White Castle
• 10% off at Chicago’s Pizza when you show your “I Voted” sticker.
• $10 off an eligible online order of at least $20 at Macaroni Grill
• FREE Tim Horton’s doughnut with “I voted” sticker and purchase of a beverage.
• 20% off at Yogurtini for those who are wearing their “I Voted” stickers
• FREE access to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
• 15 to 20 percent off items at Macy’s
• Free coffee (with any purchase) at Bojangles

Indy Favorites

• Buy 3 Get 3 FREE scones at Lulu’s Coffee and Bakehouse
  
• FREE order of reg fries (w/purchase of any dog) at King David Dogs when you show us your “I Voted” sticker

DC Favorites

• Free burgers at Z-Burger to anyone wearing an ‘I voted’ sticker or who says “zVote” to their cashier
• Beer at Happy Hour prices all day at Capitol City Brewing Company
• 2-for-1 cocktails at Art and Soul to those with an “I voted” sticker.
• Get two oysters and a shot of punch at Hank’s Oyster Bar free for voters.

We’ve scoured the internet and that’s our list for now. If you’ve already voted, thanks for performing your civic duty. If not, we encourage you to get out and vote. If you have other freebies you’ve come across, please share them with us in the comments below. If you get one of these freebies today, we’d love to hear about it. Give us a shout out on Twitter.

The post Election Day Freebies appeared first on inSourceCode.

We wanted to showcase a few of the great tech projects Issa, Kraft and Lira have worked on in 2012.

Congressman Issa was the driving force behind Project Madison and pushed to help KeeptheWebOpen. He live-streams every Oversight hearing and includes a live Twitter dialogue alongside many of the streams. Most notably, he also introduced the DATA Act to require all federal spending data be accessible online. His vision: to give developers the tools to make government more transparent.

Here are a few articles from around the web showcasing Congressman Issa’s tech work:

• Beyond SOPA: Rep. Darrell Issa’s Big Plans for Digitizing Democracy
• Congressman Darrell Issa’s Call to the Internet’s Right Side
• Inside Anti-SOPA Darrell Issa’s Laboratory for Digital Democracy

Seamus Kraft is Congressman Issa’s Director of Digital Media. He is a leader inside the halls of Congress and has helped staffers all over Capitol Hill better leverage technology to communicate with their constituents. Seamus has spearheaded the launch of micro-sites specific to Oversight investigations and heads up the OpenGov Foundation, which promotes opening up government data.

Here are a few Oversight projects Seamus worked on in 2012:

• Fast and Furious Investigation
• Saving the Postal Service
• Protecting Worker Rights

Matt Lira is Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s senior advisor. He pushes for direct democracy through programs like YouCut and organized the first U.S. House of Representatives Hackathon. Matt has helped bridge the gap between DC and Silicon Valley and is frequently quoted in major publications about technology in government.

Here are a few projects/stories that Matt was involved with in 2012:

• AmericanJobCreators.com
• Citizen CoSponsor
• Docs.House.Gov

Again, congrats to the full list. And a special congrats to Issa, Kraft and Lira whom we’ve have the honor to work with.

The post Congrats to Seamus Kraft, Congressman Darrell Issa and Matt Lira appeared first on inSourceCode.