Ryan Trask - Minneapolis SEO

Yes, you can set a pipe rather than a comma as a delimiter. It does not depend completely on Excel. It depends on Windows. The quickest way is to save the file as a CSV file.

To change the default on your PC to a pipe rather than a comma bring up your default options window by clicking Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Regional Settings.

Click the “Number” tab and in the “List Separator” field, replace the current default separator with the one you want to use (let’s say a pipe symbol | ).

Click “OK” to save the change and close the window. You can now save Excel files as pipe delimited files by simply doing the following in Excel:

Open or Create a new file in Excel.
Click File => Save As on the menu bar.
In the “File Type” drop down, select “CSV (comma separated values) *.csv”.

Photo: Just another day in the office for 3plains Interactive at B&H Outdoors. L to R (Cory Beck & Ryan Trask of 3plains Interactive/Ultimate Pheasant Hunting). 

Web Guys or Pheasant Hunters? 

I get customers, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues asking me all the time; “How in the world did you ever get into hunting since you didn’t grow up with it?”

That question is pretty easy to answer. A customer told me to go buy a gun and come on out to his lodge. The rest is history; I’m a pheasant hunter now.

Learning and Understanding the Product

Now that doesn’t mean if a customer tells me to jump off a bridge I’ll do it, but I will take the time to listen and understand their products and services. It takes time and money, but the value of the process can be very rewarding for both parties.

It’s pretty easy for us to sit in front of a computer screen, develop a customers website and launch it. However, to actually draw in pheasant hunters or better yet quality pheasant hunters and groups is another thing.

We like to take the time to learn and understand our customers product, since it can greatly enhance both of our businesses.

Adaptive Personality

Having an adaptive and open minded personality is very beneficial when it comes to working with our customers. “Techy” people (like myself) get a bad rap for being curt, rude or being a know-it-all.

Sometimes it takes that client meeting in the field and a frosty brew to break that communication barrier to understand each other to find the balance for that strong business relationship.

Have Fun

We do websites because we enjoy building them.

I’ll repeat that - We do websites. We don’t do jobs. Having a job is not very much fun.

Looks like last night (Feb 29, 2008), there was a large Google PageRank update as well as a major backlink update.

It appears that some of the larger websites have had a lot of their pages removed. A follow up will be posted shortly.

If you follow internet tech news at all, back on January 8th users were reporting that Network Solutions was domain tasting.

Domain tasting works like this; Using Network Solutions (Net Sol) domain search tool to see if a domain name idea is available, they were immediately putting a 4 day lock on all domain names searched on their site.

Essentially, they were hijacking and stealing domain names and forcing you to register the name at Network Solutions. 

This is downright disturbing and wrong. 

More than likely they did this, because users were using their search tool, then leaving their website to register the name at a competing registrar like GoDaddy.com. It only makes sense to not register your domain name at Network Solutions, since godaddy.com offers domains at 3 times less the price than Network Solutions.

I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would use Network Solutions for registering a domain name because of their corporate politics, over inflated domain prices ($30/domain), and sub-par customer service department.

Customers all over the internet were in upheaval about this unethical business practice, that a few weeks later the incident was taken care of by ICANN Board of Directors passing a resolution ending domain tasting in response to the incident.

Nice to know that was short lived. Network Solutions has added another hit to their already poor company reputation.

Other Articles and Resources:

Read the article by Jay Westerdal at domaintools.com and another article from dotsauce.com including a response in the blog comments from Network Solutions regarding the incident.

Installing Wordpress on IIS wasn’t the chore I thought it was going to be. It took me probably 2 minutes to setup the database, datasource, unzip wordpress, modify the config file, and I am up and running. However, there is a big problem with running Wordpress on a Windows Server.

The Problem:

By default, Wordpress has ugly queries URL’s and fixing the permalink structure does not get rid of that ugly index.php in the URL. Ex: http://www.rtrask.com/index.php/category/seo/

Since Wordpress was designed to run on Apache and use mod_rewrite for clean and pretty URL’s does that leave us Windows hosts and developer out in the cold? Not exactly.

The Solution:

Download and install ISAPI_Rewrite on your server, paste the following code in your httpd.ini file in your root directory of your blog website and your up and going.  

[ISAPI_Rewrite]

# Rules to ensure that normal content gets through
RewriteRule /blog/software-files/(.*) /blog/software-files/$1 [L]
RewriteRule /blog/images/(.*) /blog/images/$1 [L]
RewriteRule /blog/favicon.ico /blog/favicon.ico [L]

# For file-based wordpress content (i.e. theme), admin, etc.
RewriteRule /blog/wp-(.*) /blog/wp-$1 [L]

# For normal wordpress content, via index.php
RewriteRule ^/blog/$ /blog/index.php [L]
RewriteRule /blog/(.*) /blog/index.php/$1 [L] 

Next, add a php.ini file to your website root directory and paste this code in the php.ini file:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0

The Fixed URL

Much prettier now: http://www.rtrask.com/category/seo/ 

Anything Else?

Nope. That should be it, and you should be up and running. Thanks to Basil Vandegriend for the solution.