Stuff & Things

How To: Force the “Blog” View on Lifehacker & Gawker

Note: This is an update to a previous post.

With their new website design, Lifehacker lost me as a reader.  And I wasn’t alone—the readership of lifehacker.com dropped almost 40% since the redesign.

Gawker and Lifehacker maintain an old “blog” layout at blog.lifehacker.com, but unfortunately there’s no way to set the “blog view” as your default view.

It would be nice if these URLs could be rewritten on the fly though, eh?  Well, they can be with the X-Rewrite extension for Google Chrome!

The URL Rewrite extension has a simple configuration screen with three input fields that allow you to use regular expressions to redirect one URL to another.

The “Pattern” is:
(.*)://lifehacker.com/(.*)

The “Rewrite” pattern is:

$1://blog.lifehacker.com/$2

And voila, Lifehacker is back to it’s old self and has me back as a happy reader!