I was recently looking through my links and thought I would look at my older blogs.  One of them was a photo blog hosted over at phlog.net, a small site run by an individual that sprang up in the very, very early days of camera phone use.  It was very friendly and had a great community going.  However, it's clearly dead or dying now.  So, I posted the following on the forum over there and thought I'd put it here, too, for anyone interested:

So, I moved away from phlog to my own hosted blog quite some time ago because I was a bit concerned about having my images hosted by someone else -- this applies for me to any of the big sites, not just phlog (I don't really use flickr, or others, either). I always really liked phlog because, as a service, it was very friendly and so was Alan.
Clearly, though, phlog has basically died and been overrun with spam (even the forum has).
When I migrated off of phlog, I created some Perl scripts to grab all of my images as well as the descriptions to go with them. If the site layout hasn't changed a whole lot since then, they would still work.
If anyone is interested in these scripts, please email me -- "kf6nvr" at "gmail" dot "com". I can either provide the script for download or even try to run it over an account and provide the results via a zip file.
It's a pretty sad situation this site got in to. Hopefully this won't be drowned out in the spam, too, for anyone who might find it useful. It is certainly meant as no offense to all of those who helped support phlog over time.

The story sounds like many sites and services.  Company A buys Little Company.  Little Company employees only work on Company A stuff.  Little Company workers get tired and leave.  Meanwhile, Little Company service is left to rot yet Company A won't give up Little Company services are even sell them back to the founders.

I'm certainly in no position to try to help the service itself, but I can help out people that want help trying to get their images back if they don't have the originals.  At some point, the server will crash or go away and never come back up -- unless Company A actually tries to revive it, which seems unlikely at this point.

UPDATE:  It seems that, as of March 10, 2007, the original creator of phlog.net, Alan Bradburne, as regained control over phlog.net.  He's now moving everything off of the old server and on to the new.  This is great news for the site and my offer above doesn't really apply so long as it's around.  Not that I wouldn't if requested, but I'm no longer "recommending" it.

Posted by Shane on February 6, 2007 7:59 AM | Permalink