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!

• Theme your carnival with unusual holidays Writer's block can come at the worst possible moment, like when it's your turn to host a carnival.  You really want to get away from the InstaCarnival deal and do something special, but what? Check out Holiday Insights.  They have a big list of unusual holidays.  I had no idea......
• Using the InstaCarnival without making it look like one For those who have hosted blog carnivals in a pinch, it's a big help to have a working template that has all of the posts basically ready to go.  That's what BlogCarnival.com's InstaCarnival is.All of the posts are cast into simple sentences, likeBlogger presents A Really Cool Post over at......
• Do due diligence with hosts Getting hosts for your carnival can be tough.  It takes organization to keep things moving, and sometimes the hosting schedule gets tight.It's tempting to jump at the first person who offers.  That's fine but be sure to do some due diligence.Meaning check out their blog.  Is it a place that......
• Do a "best" list to feature posts Organizers of some of the more established carnivals are asking their hosts to feature the best posts they receive.  This is in an effort to help separate the cream from the crop and add some impact to the carnival.Tricia over at Blogging Away Debt had a neat way to feature......

• Why I Switched To Once A Month Shopping for Household Necessities After running the Quicken reports on our finances last month, I’ve been going through and identifying some money leaks. One that I’ve targeted for repair are the little trips to the store because we’ve run out of something. Now I am already careful about groceries and it wasn’t food we......
• Waxing and Repairing a Snowboard Once you have achieved what we mentioned in the last blog about removing the wax from your snowboard, you can wet the sandpaper using a little bit of water, and then use a light amount of pressure in order to sand the entire base of the board. You should take......
• Cheaper Than The Grocery Store Inspired by Alison's comment on meeting grocery budget goals:  I’ve been surprised by the same “cheaper than the grocery store” phenomenon at Target! It’s not cheaper on everything, but sometimes the difference is substantial. I buy my Tabasco and Quaker granola bars there. I am going to be comparing all......
• Getting Indexed, A Little Patience? Newbie's and Expert Internet Marketers all have one thing in common: Trying to get their websites indexed through the top three major search engines quickly. For larger websites the task is even more daunting, and there are a few small but effective techniques that can assist in the indexing process.......