[Mapserver-users] TopoZone and MapServer

[Ed McNierney]

Folks -

Although we've done quite a bit with MapServer over the past few years, one of the glaring omissions has been that our TopoZone site itself never used MapServer.  We've fixed that!

In the middle of last week we switched over to our new server architecture, and TopoZone is now a 100% MapServer site!  We're going through the usual technology-transition headaches (e.g. we finally diagnosed a failing memory module in one of our servers late last night) but MapServer's doing just fine.  We've already gone through several million MapServer map views.

One of the things this let us do is update the "Featured Map" on our home page.  We used to have 6 predefined maps, each carefully selected to look good at the small sample map size because the old TopoZone rendered map tiles and couldn't center images on an arbitrary location.  Now that we can do that, we take a random selection from our 1.8-million-entry place name database and map it.  If you're into mindless map-surfing, just go to the home page and refresh it a few times.

We've added quite a bit more viewing/scale control, and we have a lot more features coming.  Our TopoFactory subscribers are already getting to enjoy aerial photos, street maps, hillshaded topos, and quite a few other treats (aerial photos annotated with street maps are nice to have).

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242