Scaredy Cat Benchmark Page

[+frex3wv]

I used to use this website often because it had a topo option.  That option seems to have gone away.  Anyone have any thoughts?

[+frex3wv]

Anyone who has used the site in years past have any insight?

[foxtrot_xray]

Likely it went away because the USGS stopped serving Topo on their own servers, and now it's being hosted by ArcGIS, which requres a lot of different dev and licensing work done. Hence, why it's gone.

 

Note: This is all guessing; since I had to go through the same thing.

[monkeykat]

Hey everyone, I haven't bounced around these forums in a while.  I was using MyTopo by trimble, and around December 3, 2021, it stopped working, and I didn't have good error checking code on the scaredycat site so it crashed the google maps benchmark viewer.  When I went to the trimble/mytopo site, it said the site was down and had some cryptic message about "expect something great soon!".  It looks like the site is back up now, but it also looks way to slick to be offering up free topo maps like they used to.

 

I'll have to look around at what they have for topo options out there now days.  I bet GoDaddy doesn't want me serving up tiles from my own web site.  One time they told me I should keep my databases to under 20,000 rows because if I crashed the shared server they were hosting my site on it would be a violation of service, and they would be very mad at me.  20,000 rows?  Give me a break, what's that, Rhode Island marks? lol

[foxtrot_xray]

Good to see you around!
ArcGIS has the Historical Topos as an available map service layer. While I've only messed with Google earth and the Maps API in Android, I would not be surprised if there's an available library to utilize ArcGIS services in a Maps JS installation.

[+frex3wv]

Hey all - so - does anyone know of other free online topos to use? (that looks like and behaves like the one scaredy cat used to use)?

[+Viajero Perdido]

https://www.thunderforest.com/ have several topo maps that can be app-embedded, and are free up to a certain usage level.

[monkeykat]

Found some information about using ArcGIS and I may have figured out how to get the US Topo layers back.  I'll be fiddling around with it over the holidays likely, but you will need to use the OpenLayers version of the benchmark map, haven't looked into if this can be done easily with the Google Maps API.

 

I added 2 new layers, a slightly different Base Map that is kind of like the terrain map, and the USA Topo.

http://benchmarks.scaredycatfilms.com/ol/index.php