One of my favorite is the Nutcracker Market put on by the Houston Ballet Guild. The Nutcracker Market covers 550,000 square feet and features 323 national and international merchants selling holiday goodies including home décor, gourmet foods, clothing, sporting goods, novelties and accessories. Nutcracker is the best run market thanks to their fantastic team of volunteers headed by Patsy Chapman. Sales were $13.7 million and attendance was 84,551.

Here are a few of the stores that offered great gifts at affordable prices.

PJ Lady offered ladies pajamas at 3 sets for $40. Add a monogram and you had a personalized gift for under $20.

Ribbon Mom can personalize satin ribbon with your favorite bible verse, name or saying. A 10 yard roll starts at $10.

4 Home Store featuring personalized scripture plates.

In the article they mention dual credit classes. This is a great program. My son is taking it for senior English. A great way to knock off senior English and 12 hours of college English. I wish our school district offered more of these classes. Many seniors end up taking blow off classes or being student aides. If more dual credit classes were offered, seniors could be preparing for the future by taking additional dual credit classes. Ok school districts, why not offer more dual credit classes?

Tonight (Wed) American Idol shows the results of the talent search in Dallas. I heard that last night on the show. I can’t believe some of the people that try out. I guess they want their 1 minute of fame. But is 1 minute of fame worth the humiliation from Simon? Not for me.

Well watch the show and see how the talent from Dallas stacks up to the other cities. I for one won’t be watching it. Instead I’ll be at church.

Prom has gotten out of hand. For the guy, you have to get the transportation, tux rental, dinner and flowers. Lucky for us, the senior parents at our school host an after prom party so we don’t have that extra expense. Plus our kids are safe for the night. Flowers and tux are expensive enough. But the transportation is out of site.

Many will go in with friends and rent a limo. But some want the unusual and go for an exotic or classic car. Of course the teens can’t drive them, but mom and dad can rent one of the exotic cars and drive them. I can tell you first hand, they don’t mind. I have taken my son and his date several times in one of the exotic rental cars. Thanks to Ron Sturgeon at DFW Elite Auto Rental we have had a Bentley, Mercedes CLS 500, Mercedes SL500 and the Ferrari F430 F1. The Ferrari was actually for my son’s senior pictures. He and his date felt like royalty because everyone else wished they had shown up in such a car. Puts the same old limo to shame.

Start saving up. Prom is almost here.

Webmaster Guidelines Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

• Design, content, and technical guidelines
• Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelinesThese quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn’t meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.