Hosting

NOTE: The Christian Carnival is on hiatus until further notice.

We no longer use BlogCarnival and switched from weekly to monthly in August of 2012.  We are now using this submission form.  The submissions are viewable here.  The archives are viewable here.  The host schedule is viewable here.


The following is mostly cut-and-pasted from here and here, with adaptations and updated information.

Thank you for considering serving the Christian blogs by hosting the Christian Carnival. The goal of the Christian Carnival is to highlight Christian thought in the blogosphere by gaining exposure for Christian blogs and helping readers find more sites to add to their regular reading list.

Plan to spend at least two to three hours on building the Christian Carnival post. It is a big job, but you will be rewarded with many links!

These are the instructions for a host who will be hosting the Christian Carnival at their own blog, making clear what is expected of a host and which sorts of things hosts generally have freedom and discretion to do.

You will not be receiving any submissions at your email address.  Instead you will check this link (also available at the bottom of the "Host Schedule" tab above) for current submissions.  Basically, your task is to take a look at each post to see if it qualifies for submission. The requirements are:

1. The blog is Christian, in a broad sense, and the post submitted reflects a Christian worldview even if in a loose way. For example, politics, family life, ethical issues, and money management are all valid if there's at least some connection with Christian principles, but a post on tax preparation with no spiritual discussion or some partisan battle in Congress that makes no reference to Christian principles might be stretching it too much.

The Christian Carnival defines its Christianity in terms of Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic tradition as long as there's nothing undermining the creeds or directly challenging the Bible or God. Groups that call themselves Christian but deny the Trinity, for instance, are not Christian in the sense we mean. Questions about doctrine that the three main branches of Christianity differ on are matters of dispute that we wouldn't use to disqualify anyone. This is not an indication of any view one way or the other on what it takes to be a genuine follower of Christ or to be genuinely saved. It is simply a decision the founders of this Carnival made when figuring out which people will count as Christian for the sake of chronicling some of the best Christian blog posts each month.

If you have any questions about particular posts, let one of the admins know, and we can take a look and offer an opinion. The final call is yours if you want it, or you can pass it off if you'd rather have one of us decide.

2. Submissions are supposed to be from the last month, defined as midnight Tuesday night EST the last month to midnight Tuesday night EST the month you host. We usually allow a little wiggle room, but a submission in December of a post written in September is clearly too long ago. If a post is too old, it's worth an email to the submitter explaining the rule and asking if they have something more recent to submit instead. We try not to offend people who might simply not know what the Christian Carnival is supposed to be.

3. One post per person per blog. If two posts appear from the same author on the same blog, you should either choose one or offer them a choice about which to include. (If the author submitted one, and someone else submitted the other, see 4 below.) An author can submit posts from two different blogs, and a group blog can submit posts from as many different authors as there are for that blog. The limit is one per person per blog.

Most people submit their own stuff, but you can accept posts recommended by others. Just go with the author's preference if someone suggests a second post by the same person on the same blog. This rarely happens, but it's good to have a policy in case it does.

4.  For each entry include a link to and name of the main site, a link to the post and its title, and an optional short description of the post. You may edit the post descriptions provided by the author if you wish or add commentary of your own. If the submitted description is in the first person, you may want to change that.

Here is a sample:

Wittenberg Gate sends us Are You Bad Enough to Be a Christian?, a gospel presentation that emphasizes that the Christian relies on the righteousness of Christ rather than his or her own works.

Again, some hosts like to write up their own descriptions and sometimes even offer comments, and some people work in a theme to organize the whole thing or to order the posts by topic, but others just put them in order of submission (or sometimes reverse order of submission). How you do it is totally up to you and your personality. You can look through previous Christian Carnivals at the archive site if you want some ideas of outrageous or unusual ways to organize the material, but it's actually less common now to see anything very involved, and no one expects it of you.

5.  The carnival is supposed to be up sometime on Wednesday, Eastern Standard Time (GMT minus 5 hours), the first Wednesday of the month you host.  The earlier in the day you post, the better, as regular readers will be looking for it on Wednesday, as will the big-name sites who regularly promote it.  If it doesn’t happen on Wednesday it's not the end of the world.  If this is your first time there's plenty of room to extend you extra grace. But if you can get it done on Wednesday, that would be ideal. Some people try to work on it as the submissions come in so they can get it posted as early as they can on Wednesday, but don't think you need to get it up first thing in the morning. Some people stay up late getting it all done so they can just post it in the morning, and there is no need for that unless you really want to do it.

6.  If you want Maryann to social-share a call for submissions for your carnival, email her a link to the call for submissions you posted on your blog by the Friday before your turn to host.

7.  If you get an overabundance of submissions, you may limit the entries to the first 40 (or 50) acceptable entries if you wish. If you do limit entries, please do so on the basis of entry order only. Do not select your favorites.

8.  Sending trackback pings is not currently an option, and most people don't even know what that means.

9.  Once you have posted your carnival, send an email to Maryann (subject: Christian Carnival social sharing) and Rey (subject: Christian Carnival archive update), including the post URL.  If you post a link to your carnival on the FB wall please let Maryann know so she doesn't double-post it. Also let her know if you include "@CrstnCrnvl" when you tweet your post, so Maryann can just retweet yours.

10.  Please include links to the Christian Carnival home page and submission form in your carnival blogpost.

If you have any questions as you go, please don't hesitate to ask.

Thanks again for your willingness to do this!

For those who have read all this and are not on the hosting schedule and would like to be, please send Maryann an email.  We're always looking for new hosts!