here it is

Needs better smilies (ones for dark backgrounds) and stuff but I will fix that up over the coming week or so. Life is starting to calm down for me again now so I can put a little more work in around here. It feels nice to start again, this just feels.. right. I was pretty stuck all last year with what to do with the place, just kinda buried me head in the sand and waited to see what happened. The lessons are still being used tho, the search engine ranking is really quite strong and people are still interested in blabbing lol. Ditching the thing completely is not an option, wouldn’t be fair to the people using the lessons, the work I have done previously or the do more poi faithful, you know who you are, thank you for bearing with me.

So yah, off we go, I won’t be checking in too much, if I do it will be under one of a few pseudonyms most of the time, I didn’t like the responsibility of being admin before, it constricted my free speech and it became a real chore. I certainly won’t be refereeing in any arguments between members etc even if asked to intervene, I’m not censoring ANYTHING.

No mods, no rules, just low maintenance facilitation of open discussion about poi, fire, spam, meh and whatever. If you have a suggestion for a section please make it known on the board.

Enjoy

The alternative is to just start start again, I don’t personally care as I think the place was getting stale anyway apart from the quality spammage. I kinda like the idea actually, please, if you have an opinion on this, do tell me what ya fink in the comments.

What else?

DAMN!! These wordpress installations get a LOT of spam!! I’ve logged in to do a little work here and there the last month or so but spent 45 mins each time deleting spam. I’m sure there are a few code tweaks here and there or a plug in that would make the job easier but as of yet I’m still learning. More posts and general bleh soon, I’m gonna make it so others can register and possibly post too I fink.

Yes, quite.. it’s pretty much a clone of Do More Poi but it is totally a private access thing. It needed to be private because for one, it’s a good bauble to sell a Poi course with (online learning resources – practice at home) but also because as well as the weekly evening session I ran for over 16’s I was teaching in schools etc. You can’t have kiddy winks heading to Do More Poi for their learning, people swear and talk about drugs and stuff here so that was out of the question.

I guess a link would be appropriate eh? : www.poilessons.com

The other main thing about this resource is the domain name. If you know anything about the net you will know that the domain name a website operates under is about it’s most powerful asset it has with regards to being found by search engines and therefore people. If someone somewhere wants a pink lawn mower, they usually type those exact words into Google. If you own pinklawnmower.com then 9 times outta 10 you are coming first, without even trying.

The idea with this one at first was simply to get some easy hits from people looking for Poi lessons  in my home city of Manchester, England. Then I kinda realised that via subdomains the same could be done for anyone. A subdomain is like a website within a website, it is seen as a separate entity by search engines and performs just like any other website with regards to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). So if you were based in New York and taught Poi then it would make a LOT of sense to advertise your services via the subdomain : newyork.poilessons.com and the same as with anywhere else in the world.

I have mentioned before that I was at one point getting work in schools. This is relatively lucrative work and I highly recommend anyone wanting to teach Poi to others try doing so in schools, especially in the UK.

I did struggle however to bag contracts, this was due to the fact that the competition that was offering courses in basket weaving etc came with a nationally recognised qualification. This made the basket weaving a more attractive option to the school etc as they could justify spending their budget on it more thanks to the bit of paper.

So I put a buttload of effort into getting Poi recognised by the governing body of educational qualifications in the UK. This body is called the AQA. The acronym stands for “Assessment and Qualifications Alliance” they are the largest of the three exam boards, awarding 49% of full course GCSEs and 42% of A-levels nationally. In total, students take over 3.5 million exams with them each year. You can read more about them here. It was a long and arduous process but in the end, it was done and worthwhile.

Here is the actual qualification registered in their database : Nationally Recognised Poi Qualification – AQA

Pretty cool huh? If you are interested in doing this do get in touch, I am a big believer in Poi being taught in schools and am happy to assist others in doing it. To use the online back up will cost a nominal amount but you will find it to be extremely worthwhile as a sales tool. i wouldn’t recommend sending potential learners to Do More Poi though, not if they are under 16 etc.

Basically the board needs about 7-8 hours of my time to be back into the functional state it was before I closed it down last year, so to all of you guys waiting to joyfully spam it again, it’s not long now, I aim to have it completed this week. I’m pretty good at time management these days too so that estimate won’t be far off lol

From here on in however it will be unmoderated, I have decided to go zen on the whole politics side of running a message board. Spam will be removed and abusers will be messed around but aside from that, people will be encouraged to say whatever they want about whatever they want. I have always felt that the fire spinning scene needed a speakeasy and for a very short while it did indeed fill that role. Then, alas, the one simple rule (play nice) turned into a fkn millstone around the places neck and no one was allowed to say anything that anyone else didn’t like. Pah!!! No more.

Mkay then.. just a quick update as to how the board is coming along, for now tho, I’m going having some brekkie and taking the Bobo out for a walk to enjoy the beautiful sunshine that the UK is basking in right now.

I saw my first Bumblebee of the year yesterday. It’s spring!!

k so the site has been down for a while eh?

To cut a long story short I have been in Canada for a while and shortly before I left the shores of Britain I broke the database ever so slightly during maintenance. The message board was getting very quiet too apart from the odd bitch fest so rather than stress out trying to fix the database thing a day or two before I left I just thought “Screw it. I need a break from it anyway..”

Then I spent the last two days chilling in the garden, it was summer and it was lovely. I flew off two days later and didn’t have any meaningful kind of connection to the net (a computer with the right tools for website shenanigans) for another few months. This was also, quite lovely.

The lesson pages have always been up however, and they have still been used extensively. I was happy to see that was the case when I did check in on the stats from time to time, that’s why I left them there during my bout of travel/laziness, people were obviously still looking hard for poi lessons and were still visiting domorepoi even though I had committed search engine suicide and put a blank index page up just before I left. This has stayed the same for 7 months now so I am going to do the site justice and put stuff up again if only to a basic extent.

So yah.. I am now back in the UK, with all the tools I need to make this place tick. Using blog technology for the content seems like a good way to go now so I have customised a wordpress installation as you may or may not be able to tell and will be putting some of the old html pages into this format. I will of course be using the thing to blog too and look forward to doing so. I may put the board back up (depends on the hits) it will however be completely unmoderated apart from spam removal if I do.

Oki doki, thats my couple of hours a week spent, BRB.