Andrew Engstrom

Client Communication: How to do it, and Why it’s Important

Client communication is essential for maintaining healthy and productive relationships with your client. Without proper communication, things break down and go wrong.

Remote Work with a Newborn Baby

Working from home can be great but challenging. Add a newborn into the mix, and that takes it to an entirely new level. Before having a baby, the house was quiet.

Improving Stability and Security on Your WordPress Site

Have you ever heard of the term “deferred maintenance?” It’s commonly used in the real estate business to describe work needed on a property that has been delayed until the owner has the time and money to deal with it.

How to Properly Set Up Transactional Email on Your WordPress Site

What are transactional emails? The name may sound fancy or technical, but almost everyone has experience with them.

Differences Between a Prebuilt Theme vs. Building a Custom Theme

Configuring WPEngine for WooCommerce

Many people underestimate WooCommerce. Internally, there’s a lot going on. It’s frequently disliked for a lack of full-featured e-commerce functionality.

How to set up Laravel auth scaffolding using Jetstream in Laravel 8.x

In a popular move among developers, Laravel 8 has distanced itself from its auth scaffolding for a more modern approach using the Jetstream package.

Proper Deployment Procedures and the Importance of Version Control in WordPress Development

Have you ever worked in a group setting? Each person has their own list of responsibilities, deadlines, and goals, but everyone on the team is utilizing the same file base for storing updates to the project. Has this happened to you?

WordPress Security: How to Protect Your Site from Brute Force Attacks with URL Masking

Imagine it’s 10pm on a Friday night. You’re catching up on some (insert cool, recent TV show), trying to relax. Suddenly, you get a concerning text from your employee telling you to look at your website.

Do I Need a Staging Site?

Picture this – you’re making a change to your custom WordPress E-Commerce theme. You click save, and you get the infamous white screen. You refresh the page a dozen times and wonder where you went wrong, and what you did to deserve this fate?

Using CORS and Ember-Data to point an Ember app to multiple backend deployments

At Curious Minds we have developers working from different offices doing backend and frontend work on the same projects, so we need a deployment scenario that allows developers to make local changes without fear of breaking things for everyone.

Updating Lookup Fields From PHP – Force.com Toolkit for PHP

Utilizing a Force.com backend for your data can prove to be a very challenging project. Perhaps you are trying to minimize development costs, or you are trying to utilize the Force.com backend that you already have.

CSV / XLS Exporting in Adobe Coldfusion 9

Let’s talk about XLS Exporting in Adobe Coldfusion 9 (Excel Spreadsheets). ColdFusion has this neat little tag called cfspreadsheet. It allows the writing of, updating of, and reading of CSV/XLS files in ColdFusion.

New Website Launch

Welcome to our new website, and apologies for the mess during our construction phase. Something about the shoemaker’s kids not having a pair?

Jersey Boys Becomes 27th longest running show in Broadway History!

“JERSEY BOYS, the Tony, Olivier and Grammy Award-winning Best Musical, surpassed Oklahoma! with 2,213 performances last night, March 17, making it the 27th longest-running Broadway show in history.”

Magic Tree House: The Musical

The challenge of the Magic Treehouse Musical was to create interactive website that captured the vibrancy of the stage production, yet still had good search visibility.

Embedding Irregular Fonts in Flex 3

Often in programming, what seems to be a simple task can trip you up. Yesterday I was trying to embed the font Helvetic Neue LT Com Bold 77 in a css style sheet for a project of ours.

Jersey Boys Named 5th Best Theatre Production of the Last 25 Years

Entertainment Weekly recently came out with their list of “The New Classics”, and named their 50 best plays and musicals of the last 25 years. Coming in at number 5 was Jersey Boys.

Jersey Boys Videos for The Palazzo

Curious Minds Media just finished a series of videos for the Las Vegas production of Jersey Boys. This hit musical will be premiering in Vegas in April 2008 at The Palazzo Hotel and Casino.

Double Happiness Creations Flex Store Launch

We’ve just completed a cool little application for Yvonne Wong’s company Double Happiness Creations. She specializes in creating custom greetings and invitations.

Curious Minds!

Welcome to the Blog of Curious Minds Media, Inc. We’re a web dev group in upstate NY. I figured that it might be a good idea to start keeping track of the strange stuff that goes on around here.