The 83rd Carnival of Homeschooling, featured on the homepage of BlogCarnival.com, wrapped the posts up in a check-up theme.  This was very effective and made the carnival a pleasure to read.

Bulletized lists are all right, and they serve their purpose, which is to provide links to the on-topic submitted articles and encourage readers to click through.  Putting more effort into the carnivals draws more traffic because of the buzz factor.

Grouping the posts into different “sections” like listening to your heartbeat, getting rest, getting exercise, diet, and so forth, probably means reading a majority of the posts, or at least pondering the titles of the posts, before writing much of anything in the carnival post.  I know from my own experience hosting carnivals that a good chunk of the submissions come in on the 11th hour — heck, that’s when I submit a lot of mine!  So likely a lot of this writing was done under a little bit of time pressure.

Congratulations on a great carnival!

• An unfortunate reality of hosting a blog carnival The larger benefit goes to the people who submit to the carnivals rather than to the people who put forth all of the effort to host them. A number of bloggers I respect have figured this out already, and they're fairly reluctant to host a carnival anymore. They understand the......
• Powerful backlink tool, or spammer in a box? One of the sidebar ads within BlogCarnival.com showed a blog carnival submission tool called Xingla Pro 3. Honestly, I thought submitting articles to different blog carnivals was pretty easy, but this tool appears to make it ridiculously easy.  Maybe almost too easy. I asked a question of a guy who......
• Dealing with spammy submissions As a blog carnival gets more popular, the number of submissions goes up, and the traffic the carnival gets goes up as well.  This is good.  Unfortunately, this popularity also attracts posts that are of marginal quality or are highly commercial.  Or, people will submit several posts to a single......
• How tightly does one need to control a carnival? As blog carnivals get big and well-established, the traffic gets pretty substantial.  This attracts more posts, both good and bad.  The good posts, because it's a good, long-standing carnival that bloggers want to submit to.  The bad posts, because it's an easy, high-traffic link for not that much work.Initially, when......

• Home Ownership: it's just a little bit more . . . Someday, I hope to own another home, but not until I am good and ready. We are quite happy with our rental situation at the moment. When we purchased our first home, after a year of marriage, everyone told us what a great decision we had made - "It's......
• Belated Weekly Roundup It has been a few weeks since I've given my fellow personal bloggers some love with my favorite reads of the week. I've been slowly plodding along with a site redesign, which has been taking up a little bit of my time, so stay tuned for some upcoming changes! MLR......
• Drive Traffic with Twitter Twitter is viewed as just another social networking tool that you can utilize in order to better promote your website or your blog. You can use Twitter to promote your blog quickly and easily, and this is a truly effective way to drive more traffic without much effort. First, you......
• Virginia Bridal Gowns and Engagements Here comes the wedding day! Anywhere in Virginia you are, you need or you will need a bridal gown. The wedding day comes as a beautiful and memorable experience with many wedding tasks that you have to finish. You may feel a little bit baffled at the beginning. You may......