Mapping Hacks

4

|

Chapter 1, Mapping Your Life

#1 Put a Map on It: Mapping Arbitrary Locations with Online Services

HACK

More on the MapQuest LinkFree service

The previous examples focused on using latitude and longitude, but

MapQuest LinkFree URLs also accept the address of your target location as

a parameter. Here is a sample LinkFree URL that creates the map shown in

Figure 1-1:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?city=sebastopol&state=CA&address=1005+

gravenstein+hwy+n&zip=95472&country=us&zoom=6

That long URL can be broken down into the following parts. This is the root

of the main MapQuest web site:

http://www.mapquest.com

They have a directory called Maps that includes a program called map.adp

that generates the map in response to your parameters:

/maps/map.adp

When you see a ? in a URL, you know that what follows are parameters (or

arguments) for your request. In this case, we are telling the program map.

adp that we want to see a map for Sebastopol:

?city=sebastopol

Figure 1-1. MapQuest LinkFree map of O’Reilly Media, Inc. headquarters