I thought it might be helpful to share my experience with importing journals from that "other site."  I used the other site's export function to export 2 journals, and Jeff provided a spot for me to upload the exported files so he could perform his magic and import them to the Cycle Blaze site.  When he got them ready they showed up in My CycleBlaze just like any journal I had created, but they were not yet visible to the public.   Jeff fixed a lot of problems dealing with file extensions labeled wrongly and such, but there was still a bit of work for me to do. 

The maps and profiles I had created  on the other site did not transfer - not surprised about that - the titles I had given to the maps did transfer over as the "caption" to a photo would, and where the map should be it looked as though a photo had been there but couldn't be shown due to a technical glitch.  What I did to fix this was to simply take a snip of the map/profile for each day from the journal located on the other site, save that snip, then bring it in to my journal as you would for any photo.  Not technically hard, but a bit tedious since this had to be repeated for each of 72 days.   These maps/profiles won't be as useful as having an interactive RWGPS map in my journal, but they can still be useful to someone for route planning.  

I had a reference to the Guestbook feature of that other site in about half of my journal entries, so I changed those to refer to the comment feature found in journals on this site.  I also had links to favorite pages in the journal in the epilogue, and I had to change those links of course.  Finally, there were a few photos that for some reason did not transfer over, so I had to replace those in the journal.  Considering the journal has about 1,000 photos, this was a very low percentage.  

My Transam adventure was my first long tour, and as such it's very special to me - it got me hooked on touring 6 years ago at the age of 62.  So I'm very grateful to get it loaded onto this site and share the adventure with others who may be considering the Transam route.   The imported journal can be found here -->  Buddy Rides A Bike .  All in all, it was fairly painless to export my journals to this site.

Hi, George - welcome to CycleBlaze, I'm enjoying reading your imported journal.

I imported one or two from the other site and also moved a few "Throwback Tour" writeups I had done on a friend's website - definitely easier importing with Jeff's help than what I had to to to get vanilla website versions into CycleBlaze, but still a bit of tweaking needed.

Jeff Arnim imported 24 of my tour journals from the other site. I was aware that the embedded maps on the other site would not transfer, so I manually downloaded the .GPX files of all the maps that I created on the other site. Then I uploaded those .GPX files to RideWithGPS and used the "embed map" function to add the maps to  my Cycleblaze journals.

I mostly do just one map for an entire tour route, so the number of maps to transfer was manageable. A few journals also had more "zoomed in" route maps every 3 or so days. I didn't bother to import those maps because it was just too many maps.

I sympathize with the people who have daily route maps. That would be a huge project to import all those editable maps to newly created CycleBlaze journals.

My success in transferring photos is 100%. I don't think I lost a single image that was saved in the old journals. "Relation" photos didn't transfer because those images are merely links. Most of the "Relation" photos were links to other journals created by me, and easy to add manually. "Relations" to journals created by others were lost permanently.

Overall I'm very happy with the import process. Don't mind how long it took because it was a huge project. While waiting for Jeff to do all the imports, I manually re-created 4 other old journals.

Unfortunately, I somehow failed to download my Tour de Cascadia journal from the other site before the owner deleted all of my content. I have all the photos and my paper journal, so in theory I could re-create that 34 day journal here. Someday...

Thanks Wayne.  I'm one of those with daily route maps, so it's likely not worth it for me to try and salvage each day's map (other than the screen grabs I have already done).  I don't know how to export the .GPX files - I understand there is supposed to be a "GPX link" above the maps that I created on the other site and that I could download the GPX file by clicking on this link - but there is no such link above my maps.  So perhaps that functionality has changed? 

I've bragged numerous times about how I entered all of my old journals from the Crazyguy site, word for word, onto Cycleblaze.  I had fun doing it and I had no worries about the problems you describe.  I had my journals on both sites for a couple of years until one day when I was told to leave CGOAB.  I didn't post maps back then, but I've been slowly adding them since.  People really like maps.

George, my memory is fuzzy but I think that clicking the "GPX" button caused a .GPX file to quietly appear in your Downloads directory. The file name was some kind of serial number that meant nothing, so after each download I renamed the .GPX file with a descriptive route name.

I am one of those people who loves maps. I add a daily map, as I like looking at daily maps in other journals. Maps are especially helpful when route planning. That's the same reason I try to mention businesses by name - helping those who come behind me, and hoping others will also give ALL of the details!

Like Buddy, I've gone in and entered daily maps on my most recent big trip that wasn't originally posted here. The Cat Named Chevy Won't Stop This Tour  It took a whole lot of clicking, but the maps still existed on my ridewithgps page. Older trips, those daily maps are gone. 

The purpose of my reply here is to encourage others to make the effort to include maps. They make a journal even more complete!

Hi George,

Enjoyed following along on your last trans-am trip and I'm sure I'll enjoy your latest 'old' one too.

 My experience with importing Journals from 'the other place' was essentially painless. I was fortunate in that 1) I only had 3 journals to import 2) I was near the front of the ever lenghtening queue and 3) most importantly, and through pure serendipity, ALL of my rides / maps since I got my basic little Garmin 500 back in 2012 were stored in my Garmin Connect account (that I can't even remember setting up).

I stumbled upon this very fortunate occurrence when I was going the the post import cleanup of our 2015 cross Canada trip. All our rides, day rides, short tours, long tours, where I had my Garmin running, were faithfully stored in my Garmin Connect account. Apparently every time I plugged my Garmin into our computer, which was only a few times a year, all the files would be uploaded into Connect with virtually no intervention from me. 

It was a very simple task to link my Garmin Connect account to my RWGPS account, and once that was done, importing each day into our new Cycleblaze journals was just a few mouse clicks away.

We did lose all of our Guest Book comments though. It may have been possible to retrieve them but it's not the end of the world. Many people who connected with us 'over there' have found us here as well.

This turned out to be a good first-wave-of-covid project back in the spring of 2020 and it also allowed me to correct the many grammatical and spelling errors in our journals (not all of them though, as any current reader will discover).

Can't thank Jeff (and anyone else who had a hand in this site) enough for making such a clean and largely effortless process out of something that at first appeared to be daunting.

My problem was that I couldn't find the "GPX" button - I think it has been changed from how it used to be, but I finally did find it.  You have to click on the actual route line on the map on that other site - then it pops up a dialog that includes a "Download GPX" link - and that lets you download it.  Now that I know, I will go ahead and download the GPX files for each day of my Transam and Western Express journals - that's 100 downloads, but it should be fairly quick to do.   

Hi George,

We just got our Racpat RTW journal from the other site uploaded and also found some photos didn't transfer, it seemed mostly to be at the last part of the journal.

As far as maps also not transferring, rather than each day as was done on the other site, we just did an over route for the country. 

Racpat