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Yesterday I took a weekday hiatus from blogging at my new tech blog, ThisIsTech. Although I had good reasons (doctors kept me all day for “education”), I just started the blog, so every time I take a day off I feel like I’m sabotaging myself from readers and missing out on some cool tech news.

Now yesterday looks like it was a bad day to take off. I got on my computer this morning and decided to check how traffic went yesterday without any new posts. Well, it seems that I got a fair bit of traffic yesterday, thanks to StumbleUpon. According to my referrals information page, I had over 600+ people referred to my blog by StumbleUpon.

Whoever was responsible, thanks!

What happened to the quality of Digg as a website? Recently I returned to my Digging activities, after having not been active for some time. Other than the “fresh start” feeling, I also get the vibe that I’m browsing MySpace every now and then. Why? Well, if you’re a MySpace user, you know that you get the “MSOD” (myspace screen of death) error messages every 2-3 link clicks (boy does MySpace tech support stay busy).

The past few days, I’ve been staring at more “Oops” and “Oh noes” pages on Digg than I have actual content. Every time I click a link I get an error message of some sort. What the hell? I just wanted to view page two of the upcoming articles, how was the page not found?

Aside from that, the speed of the site is still an issue, but that’s okay. The new submission process takes 5-10 minutes to actually work, so I often have time to run and get food or smoke a cigarette before I return to find my “Awww Crap, something broke” page.

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I’m now officially in love with my blog ThisIsTech’s host, MediaTemple.net. I have an account using their Grid-Service, which is reasonably priced at $20 a month, and comes with some great features.

Anywho, recently my blog was down for a period of around 12 hours due to some unseen problems with their scheduled maintenance on the servers contain my “grid. I didn’t mind so much, and after the problem had been fixed I was happy with their explanation of what went wrong and just glad nothing was lost when my blog came back online.

Skip ahead to today. I just got an email from Media Temple explaining in more detail what had gone wrong, what is still wrong, and what they plan to do about it. . . oh, and I got two months of hosting accredited to my account! NOW THAT IS CUSTOMER SERVICE!

In all, Media Temple has a reputation as a great, affordable host, and this has definitely been reflected in the past week with their great communication, and awesome customer support. I’m happy to call them my home, well for ThisIsTech at least.

Digg announced today that they will roll out the long awaited “Images” category that so many have been waiting to see released. Along with the new category, they are also adding some image-related tweaks to the site. Those changes are detailed in the blog post:

• New Universal Taxonomy
  Now you can submit news, images, or videos to any category on Digg! Categories will be consistent across the board, which means you can view all media types in a given topic, or view one media type at a time (e.g., only images under the “sports” category). We’re also excited to support the launch with new categories. “Offbeat” will be its own category, with new topics, and we’re adding a whole new “Lifestyle” category with topics like Autos, Food & Drink, and Travel. As always, if you don’t want to see a particular topic or media type on Digg, you can click the customize button in the navigation to filter your view.
• New Images Crawler
  Submitting images to Digg is basically the same as submitting news and videos, with a few notable differences. When you submit a link to a web page containing multiple images, Digg will crawl the page and present up to ten image thumbnails from that page for you to choose the one you want. We’ve also added this technology to news submissions.
• Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
  We’ve added a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we’ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

Along with the new features, Digg has teamed up with Photobucket to gather content for the new category. Photobucket will add “Digg This” buttons to their photos shortly after the channel goes live tonight.

I can only speculate, having not followed the development of this long awaited feature, that the long wait is attributed to this partnership between Digg and Photobucket. Having two features on two sites as large as Digg & Photobucket roll out around the same time can be a cumbersome process, either of the two could cause delays for the other.

Read: Images and new categories launch tonight

I was seriously considering buying a domain to use with this blog. While thinking, I started going over some things at which point I decided that just using my last name would be the best solution. Jeremiah Hoyet is a relatively long name, and since my first and last name are both extremely uncommon, I think it would be best to have readers just remember one part of it.

The problem is, Hoyet.com has already been registered! No less, it was registered by a ad-farming company. I wouldn’t mind so much if the name were registered to a long-lost relative of mine, but ad farmers? Come on!

The name servers even tell a sad tale:

Name Server: NS1.HITFARM.COM
Name Server: NS2.HITFARM.COM
Name Server: NS3.HITFARM.COM

“hitfarm.com”. . .