You may already have heard about merged mining (
http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining). In short you can mine at one pool and will generate bitcoins, namecoins and in future other blockchains at once. This is not about splitting your hashrate between several blockchains. For example if you mine with 1 Ghash/s at a common BTC pool. You'll mine BTC
and NMC with 1Ghash/s each at a merged mining enabled pool. This has already been discussed at this forum:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=29074.0Merged Mining however is in testing stage. For that reason I deployed a test pool. It features the current webinterface of the MasterPool namecoin pool and is running on testnet. We already did some testing over at the namecoin forum (find the thread here:
http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=262). We want as much people as possible to participate in testing before merged mining is released. Thus if you are interested in testing your mining proxy or any miner setup with merged mining or want to get an idea how merged mining feels you are welcome to join the pool. Please post any issues or successfully mining setups in either of the threads or in the namecoin wiki (
http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining).
WARNING!
The only purpose of this alpha pool is to test merged mining. This pool is in ALPHA status.
This means your can test, but you get no guaranteed payouts (we are running on testnet anyway, thus the revenues are not usable on standard bitcoin or namecoin net). Furthermore most of the mined coins will be invalid/orphaned even on testnet. This is only a VPS. Thus please don't hammer it and don't expect it to be fixed within minutes if it crashes!
Happy mining!