March 2008 Archives

Here is a quick summary of some of the changes that were made over the last few days to Cyclogz.com:

• Metric unit support: If you prefer meters and kilometers over ft and miles, you can now login to your profile, and chose metric units for your view.
• Speed chart: You can now view the speed vs distance charted for each ride. Note that, just like elevation, the speed shown in the speed chart is a moving average, i.e., an average computed over a moving window of samples. This gives a more realistic view of the average speed along the way over the the instantaneous speed which tends to be more noisy
• Improved Widget: The widget to include a Cyclogz log on to your blog is now cleaner with several tabs showing each chart, map, and even a summary of the widget.

Happy riding.

I am pleased to announce that I introduced some major performance improvements to uploads today. On average, uploading should take 30% less time. Logs uploaded from today can also be rendered faster. This was done by performing some data compaction prior to uploading logs to Cyclogz. This compaction also applies to historical logs uploaded via the Cyclogz Uploader.

By the way, this does not effect logs uploaded prior to today. It also goes without saying that, perceived performance depends on the actual bandwidth available through your ISP and the server load.

Due to a minor change that was made on the March 22nd, uploads were broken at Cyclogz. This was fixed today. In case you tried uploading cycling logs during the last 48 hours, my sincere apologies. Please retry.

I am pleased to announce that anyone can now subscribe to Cyclogz logs using their favorite blog reader. Right, Cyclogz now supports Atom feeds. Using these feeds, you can now keep track of rides done by all Cyclogz users, or just a specific user.

Cyclogz offers two kinds of feeds - one feed for the latest logs uploaded to Cyclogz, and another set of feeds, one for each user.

For instance, on the home page of Cyclogz, you will notice a feed icon.

This feed is at URL http://www.cyclogz.com/activities/feed.

This feed includes the latest rides and their summaries.

In addition, next to each user's name, you will notice another feed icon, this one specific to each rider. For instance, here is the one next to my name:

This feed is at URL http://www.cyclogz.com/activities/subbu/feed.

With these feeds, sharing cycling logs gets easier.

Last night Cyclogz got a little upgrade. I fine-tuned the code base to make page downloads faster. More changes coming soon.

Cyclogz can now plot heart-rate data if your Garmin GPS can collect heart-rate data. No need to specially enable this feature. If Cyclogz sees this data, it will present a chart, if not it will not.

Here is an example, from a log uploaded by a rider today.

As I just have an Edge 305, while getting started with Cyclogz, I could not test with the latest Garmin gizmos, viz., Garmin Edge 605 and Edge 705. Thanks to JayC, I now know that Cyclogz plays well with Edge 705. Good to know.

Tonight, I updated map rendering at Cyclogz to provide more accuracy as you zoom into the map. On long rides, as you zoom into the map, you can now see finer details of the route.

One downsize is that, this update, in some cases, can reveal inaccurate GPS measurements at high zoom levels of ride maps.

Happy riding.

Cyclogz went through a minor update last night. The charts and maps that you see on Cyclogz.com can now be embedded in your blogs or other web sites. Here is an example

Here is another example, which includes both the map and the charts:

To display these on your blog or web site, just open the log you like, and look for a piece of HTML at the bottom of each page.

Happy riding, and blogging.

As you may have noticed, Cyclogz does not ask for any user inputs like titles, places, descriptions etc at the time of uploading logs. Why? That is just to keep the uploading process as fast possible. But what if you do want to edit some details? You can do so leisurely. To try it out, login, and visit the page of the activity you want to edit. For instance, take this page:http://www.cyclogz.com/activity/42.The page displays hints like the ones shown in the screen shot below:

You will notice similar hints for the blog URL and ride notes. To edit, just click on the text above (i.e. "San Ramon Loop"):

Enter the title you wish to have for the ride, and hit save. That's it.You can do the same for ride notes and few others as well.

At Cyclogz.com, there was a problem sending emails to signed up users. It should be back up now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

After spending nearly three months of weekends and nights, I am happy to announce that an alpha version of Cyclogz.com has gone live today. The goal of Cyclogz is to provide an easy and intuitive means to upload, manage and share cycling logs directly from Garmin™ GPS-enabled cycling computers like my own Garmin™ Edge 305. The steps to upload a log are quite simple:

•  Plug-in the GPS via a USB cable to your Mac or Windows PC
• Click on the "Upload" link at the top-right corner (of course, you need to sign up and be logged in to see this link)
• Let Cyclogz.com identify your GPS computer, and then select the button that says "Read cycling logs from the selected device"
• Once it shows the logs, just click on the "Begin Uploading" button

That's it. Behind the scenes, Cyclogz figures out all the ride related data, like the start and end places of the ride, the distance, elevation profile, and so on. Later on, you can change certain details of the ride or even add your own ride notes. Check out the rides that have already been uploaded:http://www.cyclogz.com/activities. I will be profiling various key features of Cyclogz.com in the following several days. Please come back, and don't forget to spread the word.

Welcome to the Cyclogz blog. This is a blog about a free site to manage cycling logs specifically tuned for those using Garmin GPS computers like Garmin Edge 205, 305, etc. Please subscribe to this blog's feed to learn more about the features of Cyclogz.com as well some of the upcoming features we are working on. Happy riding.