A month or two ago, I signed in to my Textamerica control panel to see if I could figure out why my new posts weren’t going live on my photo journal. Sometimes their system needs a little pop-wiggle-wiggle to get it to work. TA had been running on a skeleton crew for over a year now (thanks to their “Phase 1: Steal Underpants, Phase 3: Profit! -style business model), and I wanted to be understanding.

Why bother? Well… there’s a bit of a history.

I was one of the first to sign up and run with Textamerica. Hell… long before I was even into blogs, sharing mixes, or any of that, I started my photo journal from my tiny Sony Ericsson T610… or was it the Panasonic GU87? Man, that was a while ago.

And I loved the community. I met people from all over, learning about them and their interests, and relating to them… all through the lens of a device they were carrying with them in their daily life. Sometimes exciting, sometimes painfully mundane… but always personal.

So when Textamerica said “no free moblogs”… users fled and gave them the finger. Extamerica was born.  I was fine paying the monthly fees (I had been for a while, so I could customize my template, which I had a lot of fun doing). When they erased TONS of my real friends moblogs (which they started because they saw how much I liked mine) without so much as an email for warning… I was pissed, but I stayed. Even though their once thriving, news-worthy community was pretty much dead.

But as I said.. a couple months ago, I logged in.

They said they’re going to delete all moblogs (even the premium ones) unless they went commercial… which is a heft increase in cost - from $8.99/ month to $400/month.

Yeah… no.

So I had to find a new home. Big deal, right?

With no means to automagically save the images out, embed titles and descriptions and such, and move to somewhere else… was cause for slight panic. As I didn’t have time to do all this mess manually, and move across Canada, and deal with an increasingly demanding work schedule.

After MUCH searching online, I knew I had to move to Flickr. To do what I wanted - embed images in a timeline fashion, on my own blog - I had to also switch my *other* blog. Ugh. I had been wanting to move to switch to Wordpress - a much more flexible bloggin engine -  but I didn’t want to spend all the time and effort.  Not right now.

But in the end, TA going even more belly-up was the shove I needed. I’m on Wordpress now, and the photostream is now under MY domain (no longer on textamerica’s domain). I made it! My blog is now Wordpress, using Flickr and the photos-flickr Wordpress plugin.

A special thanks to Tony Hayden for his kick in the pants “you gotta figure out a solution!” encouragement and Mark Rushing’s help with temporary hosting and php errors. Another heaping of love to Michael Goff for his help, networking and uber-blogger mentorship, too. Eric, too, for his Flickr help. You guys all rock.