After three years and countless hours of pouring her heart and energy into hooping.org, Ariel Meadow Stallings recently made a major decision, the decision to resign from hooping.org.

She writes, "It's been a great project for three years, but I'm excited to get myself focused on offbeatbride.com. Plus, like Lotus Magazine [which Ariel had worked on previously], I found that the administration challenges of running a community media project eventually eclipsed the joy I originally found from the community. I'm hoping that I realized it a little sooner with hooping.org than I did with Lotus, so that I can still squeeze out some hooping joy without worrying about the socio-cultural dynamics." We hope so too.

It was a decision she had been agonizing over for some time and we wish her nothing but the very best with her new projects. She will be missed. When something this major happens everything gets shaken up and as Vera and I have watched as the dust began to settle, we were in agreement that with or without her departure it was time for a change.

Today hooping.org's rebirthing process is complete with the launching of our new online magazine style format. One of the things we also wanted to do was make the site as inclusive to all hoopers all over the world as possible. As a result of this we made the decision to discontinue having specific site contributors, and we'd like to thank Kara, Jason, Rob, Stefan, Christabel, Sarah, Amy, Bunny Star and Orange for their contributions over the past three years, as we open Hooping.org Magazine up for submissions from everyone. Got an interesting story related to hooping? We'd love to see it. Have a video you think others need to see? Send us the link. We welcome your involvement - even if it's just giving us a heads up to something you've seen that you think we all really need to know about.

A major challenge we've experienced with hooping.org in the past as well has been the management of our lists, particularly the Hoop Merchandise Marketplace. Over time as more and more people began making and selling hoops, including hooping companies who wanted to pimp their wares, we found ourselves having quite a dialogue. Is it ethically acceptable to post a link for hoop sales we don't feel good about? Is it discrimination to not include everyone? Did our original hoopmaker system and it's subsequent removal to an archived page result in favoritism? As part of our rebirthing process we want to let go of things that aren't equitable. Our new Hoop Marketplace is managed through Adbrite and is all about being affordable ($20 for three full months). Text link advertisements generally cost $50 for just one week!

We hope you enjoy Hooping.org Magazine. It not only delivers more content, it provides much better access to the wealth of hooping information put together here over the past three years. We've upgraded our content management system too, which not only makes us incredibly happy, it makes things better for everyone - comment sections will no longer close a week after being posted to prevent comment spam, for example. The backend has been rebuilt as well. We've even moved and our new hosting service at Internet Connection is the best we've ever had.

Thank you Ariel for all you've done for hooping.org, and here's to a new and improved beginning. We hope you enjoy and make good use of it.

- Philo Hagen