Cyclogz – track your bike rides
I recently got a Garmin Edge 305 Bike GPS. And I wanted to track the data.
Garmin comes with a Training Center which works okay as a desktop software but to upload online and to share there are certain limits.
I tried a few sites but I settled on Cyclogz.
MapMyRide – The whole site looked very crowded – there was just too much portal stuff around. I just wanted to load a route, view the route and get out – so very simple usage plus look-and-feel would be my preference.
Bikely – The site looks clean and simple but wants only a GPX file. The Garmin spits out a TCX file. And there are free utilities to convert it to GPX – but it’s one _more_ step for me to do. Come on, Bikely, why can’t you use one of those conversion scripts and accept my TCX file ?
Garmin Connect – As very good and sleek and well-designed the GPS device itself is, the web application is not as sleek. There are lots of inter-links, suggestions. Often times, you are left wondering if you are signing up for the right service. They have motionbased.com and then they have Garmin Connect – one is supposed to become the other (I forgot which is which).
Cyclogz – A very cool site. The site itself is written by a passionate biker. Cyclogz was recommended to me by Anand. The home page is very clean and simple.
Sign up process is simple. Your own page is also clean. For example, here is my profile page. Cyclogz uses Garmin’s Communicator Plugin – so the device is directly identified by the website itself and the data can be uploaded. Very cool. Kudos to Garmin for enabling such a feature (and not locking everyone to use only their software to get things out of the device).
Here is an example activity of mine – a ride from Redwood Shores to Union City. All you can consume data porn. Just plain awesome.
You can embed your activity too (although watch out since it does take a long time to load).
I recommended Cyclogz to a couple of my friends and they are happy as well. There is also provision to automatically post to twitter and to wordpress. Also, very cool.
Two nitpicks :
1. When you sign in, you click on the user input box and type your name. The password field has a bunch of dots. Now, I don’t know if the dots are the default ones or did my firefox auto-password-remember-fill do that ?
2. The activity page loads a bit slowly. It is understandable that the Google Maps is a third-party service plus the other charts are very intensive – in any case, it takes more than 5 seconds to load and that is a lot. Hopefully once the alpha phase is over, things will get better and faster.
Overall, I am a fan of Cyclogz and just love it. Give it a try.