We have been busy creating new Web sites for you over the past several weeks, so I am sure many of you are still having some trouble finding your favorite places around here. I thought I would take a few moments to offer some pointers to my favorites as well as give you some news as well.

First the news. Next week we launch our revamped discussion forum site called Forumz. You can get a look at the beta now and start to feel your way around. I know many of you haven’t spent much time on our forums of old, because they weren’t very interesting and were an island of content into themselves. We are attempting to change that and the first change will be incorporating some new technology that brings in public Usenet discussions into our community. We have also tried to align the forum topics along the lines of the new sites that we have launched, along with a special series of forums devoted to software topics. The goal will be to get things truly integrated into our actual article pages, so you can see quickly what people are talking about while you are reading through the articles.

With Forumz, we will have a total of eight different sites to serve up content. In addition to the original classic Tom’s Hardware and Tom’s Networking, we have sites devoted to mobile products (MobilityGuru.com), digital entertainment (DenGuru.com), gaming (TwitchGuru.com), news (TG Daily.com), and our comparison shopping service TG Stores (stores.tomshardware.com). That is quite a constellation of sites, to be sure.

To help you keep track, we will be cross-posting some of our stories on more than one place. We have also placed all of our columnists and op/ed pieces on TG Daily archives, but will run links to them to the places where they make sense. So if you need to find my back columns, or Omid’s Second Hand Smoke, or our gaming columnist Aaron McKenna, you can find them easily here.

Finally, if you are adept at using RSS feeds, you may want to include the feeds to each of our various sites in your favorite reader. This way you can keep track of which stories we post each day. And given that we now post dozens of news links, and several dozen stories per week, having your RSS feeds setup is a nice way to look back on our mountain of content coming your way. If you go to our RSS page, you can find links to all of our current feeds.

Here are some articles you might want to take a look at that we posted in the past week :

Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu, a small external USB hard drive that can boot Linux directly. New Uses for your iPod, we excerpt an electronic book that tells you how you can use your iPod for making backups of important files, on MobilityGuru. My own review on Tom’s Networking of two software products from McAfee and Pure Networks that help simplify network installation and configuration, Diary of a home network, also on Tom’s Networking, our managing editor Tim Higgins chronicles living the LAN large and gives some great recommendations on wiring choices, Modding your console for imports over on TwitchGuru we show you how to make mods to run games that are only available from overseas, and finally Over on DenGuru, we look at two portable media players from Archos and Mustek.

Keep sending in those comments and let us know what you think of our expansion and ways that we can improve all of our sites.

Best

David Strom
Editor-in-chief
TG Publishing