topoquest.com

[RoySwkr]

topoquest.com is trying to be a free replacement for topozone, but New England coverage is still a little thin

 

[the_swede]

I've found that Acme Mapper and MyTopo are two great alternatives to topozone. Both use topo overlays on Google maps.

 

[ColdRiverRun]

The ADK is nearly all white out at this point but I like their attempt!

 

[RoySwkr]

I've found that Acme Mapper and MyTopo are two great alternatives to topozone. Both use topo overlays on Google maps.

Actually Acme uses Terraserver which can be an issue, some of the Terraserver scans are fuzzy, some the map slipped during the scan and the margin shows, and some the coordinates do not line up right.

And while I use Acme for my personal viewing, a problem with posting it as web links is that the link will go bad if either Acme or Terraserver changes - twice the chance of problems.

Topoquest promises to translate Topozone links correctly which would be nice if it works. One issue I see is that Topoquest looks so much like (old) Topozone that they might face a lawsuit.

 

[bignslow]

On my website I liked to provide a link to the topozone map for each mountain I had in my database. Unfortunately when topozone went to trails.com the map size sucked, plus I hated referring people to a site that wanted them to register. If you're looking for a solution to this problem (as I was). I wrote (aka modified someone else's code who did all the hard work) this javascript that uses the google maps API and parses out the lat/lon from the URL in the same format it would have been for topozone. The only modification I made was the addition of a 'zoom' attribute. I don't handle a default zoom if one isn't given (I did all of the actual map work for my website in php, the javascript parsing of the GET parameters was an afterthought). So if you want to have a default zoom you'll have to modify the code in some way.

Here's the file:
http://www.speeddent.com/jmap.php

Ignore the .php filename, I just use them by default over .html (all the code is static).

I would obviously prefer that you copy and relocate the code to your own site (remember to get a gmap API key) rather than just hot linking to mine. If you do decide to hotlink, please use: http://www.speeddent.com/map.php which uses php for parsing the GET parameters, plus it contains the rest of my site around it.

Let me know if you use it and you have any suggestions for improvement.

Mike

 

[woodstrider]

topo on the net

My heart broke when topozone was purchased by mytrails.com. I used that site to down load maps of not only mountains and wild areas but even urban areas that I used for my geocaching activities. I could both locate a cache and also hide one using this website. Thanks for the info- I will try these sites for my geocaching.

 

[audrey]

Topoquest's coverage is getting better, but MA is still missing!