In fact I’m interested in all three GHacks “streams”. If you will split the content – I just will subscribe to all the new blogs/feeds.

If there is some topic I don’t like to read (Vista or Windows 7 for now), I can create filter automatically marking such tags or topics as read in my RSS client (Feedreader), or, in the case I fear to miss something, create the “smartfeed”, gathering all such RSS articles to quick check and marking as read.

Thank you very much for asking our opinion – I like such attitude and value it. :)

The tendency goes to keeping everything on one site offering multiple feeds that cover both all articles and only selected ones. (That’s actually already possible)

I’m thinking of redesigning the homepage and site to reflect the change. It would look more “magazine style” of the frontpage with the latest articles on 3-5 selected tags or categories (it would display all articles but also selected categories like Linux or Web Development).

I do visit the site itself sometimes, and i don’t think it needs a format change (to accompany splitting up the RSS feeds, that is). It’s fine if all the articles still appear on this page, same as now. I realize that means non-RSS readers will be completely unaffected by the change. Perhaps tagged sections would be the best approach for them? Just my two cents.

Good job boys.

Previous time when you changed the design it did hurt the conversions so you was forced to go back to the old design. But by not changing the header, but only the structure of the homepage this would probably not be a problem in this case. Because although the change, it would still be recognisable as gHacks and it’s only the homepage.

And to be sure it works well you should use Google website optimizer to do an a/b split test with the old and new homepage. Then redirect a part of the overall traffic to the test (or all the traffic for a faster result) to see how it affects the behaviour of your visitors.

I think it is possible to post the Linux and webdev articles here without negative consequences.

What about restructuring the homepage in a more magazine like style where you have different sections on the homepage. A grid with the main section for the “standard” articles and two smaller sections with the specialized articles.

Then people will not be so distracted by different topics they might not be interested in but you still have everything on one place.
Using a new layout for the homepage together with separated RSS would be the perfect solution I think :-P .

Then you have the best of both, but probably none of the negative side effects!
And admit, the homepage really need a makeover.

I also like your navigation button for Linux. It acts as an automatic search filter for me whenever I want to find Jack’s Linux articles.

Another button for WebDev would make navigation handy, too, although WebDev is a subject I’m not personally interested in.

Thanks for asking!

At the time I write this there are 39% voting for separating the articles to a second blog. Although this is not the majority it really is a lot, even though many more should have the change to vote. (Sticky this.)

About the coding part of this discussion I already gave my opinion, but about linux articles not.

So although there might be a compromise between standard ghacks posts and coding posts, I think linux really should be on a subdomain or separate domain.

The reason is that or you use Linux either Windows (or something else). The mass who is using Windows is not interested in Linux software since they cannot use it and the mass of the Linux crowd is not interested in Windows because they cannot/have chosen not to use it.

So I vote now on creating a separate domain. Probably sub domains I guess, but splitting up the RSS is also a good idea I haven’t thought of yet.

Anyway, having alternative articles on this website might result in more visits on the short run, but on the long run I expect less people subscribing because then it’s not a speciality store any more but a supermarket.

Ghacks does not equal coding/Linux. Making people aware that it does equal coding and linux now, will very likely hurt the long term rss subscribers.

What happened to Take 9 ? It was a nice idea, but it was missing regular post, so you should maybe post about game in gHacks too.

You’ll only split the reader that way. And you’ll have to maintain 2-3 websites instead of just one.