I'm sure there is a simply way to mark my journals as complete, but I have yet to find out what it is ;-{. Since I've made the commitment to copy several more major old journals of mine to cycleblaze .com I need to know how to mark them as complete.

Hey Mark,

CycleBlaze doesn't have an option to mark a journal as complete. The only things that affect the status of how a journal is displayed are the starting and ending dates you provide.

If the starting date for a tour is in the future, the journal gets categorized as Upcoming. If the starting date has passed, but no ending date has been set (or the ending date has not yet arrived), the journal is categorized as On the Road. It drops out of that category after the ending date has passed.

Thanks. I was a bit careless about explicit dates for my journal pages on my own website, but I can make up approximate dates as needed. I can understand why you've labeled end date as optional, but that really isn't an accurate label  when you use that field to determine if the tour is still 'On the Road'

It seems appropriate to me to make it optional, since some ongoing trips are open-ended with the end date not yet known.

Very few tourists - and yes I've met a few of them but I don't think any of them were keeping an on-line journal - are on the road permanently ;-}.  I'm not really arguing that isn't OK to keep the end date open but rather it should be noted what that leaving it open indicates that you are still classified as on the road. 

I have never done a "live" journal during a tour and have the utmost respect for the people who find the time and energy to do it well.

I make my journals after the tour is finished. My 2021 journals were created here on CycleBlaze, but older journals were originally published elsewhere and re-created here.

I accept that the user interface isn't optimized for creating journals after a tour, and think that the interface should be optimized for "live" tour journals. Yes, a blank end date means you're still on a tour.

For the first two tours I did, in the last century ;-}, I had no option but to create their journals  after finishing each tour. Their text was created, based on tape recordings I made each night during the tour, on a computer after I hot home and digital images were  created by scanning 35 mm slides. 

I first carried a laptop computer on my 1998 Canadian Maritimes Tour so I was able to create the ride report text each day and email it to the Touring List.  I took a few photographs each day and added  scanned images from them to the text reports to create web pages.

I carried my first decent digital camera on my Tour99.  That meant I could create web pages each day, upload them to my website, and then lightly edit them to create ride reports to be  emailed to the Touring List and a few other friends and family members.

Since then I've created  about 50 journals containing a total of many thousands of digital camera images while on tour.

My first  cycleblaze journal stayed in "On the road" for a long time after I finished creating it during the tour.  I didn't know that the end date, which was/is  clearly labeled as "optional", was what determined that I'd finished that tour on cycleblaze. My own touring journals had labels like European Tour 05 and pages indexed by day numbers.

I copied my next two cycleblaze journals, one from my most recent journal before coming to cycle blaze and the other from the first journal I did fully on line, 20 year earlier. both of them got stuck in "On the road" so I asked how to mark them as complete.

 Having finally found out that the end date is not really optional, I won't have that issue again. 

Mark, we have all learned how to use this web site by trial and error. Your experience is the norm. Creating journal pages is easy now that I've had a lot of practice.

The only functional glitch I deal with regularly is that copy/paste of text breaks embedded maps. I deal with that by embedding the map after I finish editing the text.

Mark, I think the idea is that the end date is "optional" in the traditional use of the word with regard to websites, in that you are not required to fill in that field in order to create your journal. That's as compared to some of the other fields such as Title and Journal Address, which as required fields. I'm not speaking for Jeff, just offering my thoughts as a (retired) web guy.

That being said, I can imagine it might be nice to have a more robust explanation on the journal create screen that explains how those dates are used in the display of a journal. I really enjoyed reading your journals by the way!

That definition of optional does make sense in the context of a website. Thanks.

I'm considering which of my recent tours -in the last few years before the pandemic - to copy to cycleblaze. Most of them use a text followed by images format which, because of the tools available on cycle blaze, will make the copying process much less labor intensive for me. I switched to that format on crazyguy because it was 'natural' to organize and crop the images, upload them as a block and later create the text and caption some of the images. Since I now get the images from cropped screen captures, it is easy to include the captions as part of the crop and then I can use cycleblaze' s image upload tool to upload all of the saved image files as a block.

I'm pleased that you enjoy reading my journals. Early on - 20 years ago - someone described reading my journals as like experiencing the ride with me.  I always wrote them as a 'letter ' to a friend about my day's ride. I wanted to share with them my experiences each day. I remember getting complaints from my wife, and a few other friends,  about too many pictures of shoulders, but good shoulders, rough or bumpy shoulders, and/or lack of shoulders, were a very important factor in the quality of my riding experience.