Web Site To Show Radius Around an Area?

Factual Questions
1

Is there a web site about that would highlight, say, a 20 mile radius around Denver? Basically a mapquest + radius highlight feature?

2

I don’t know if there’s a ready-made website that lets you do this (I’m guessing there OUGHT to be – it’s a pretty common need, I imagine – but I just don’t know any offhand). But here are some other options:

  • If this is a one-time thing, just save the map as a picture and add a circle yourself using MS Paint or similar. The map should come with a scale and you can just estimate the size.

  • You can hack around with the Maps.com Radius Maps samples. Maps.com sells custom radius maps, but they provide a free sample using the Maptuit mapping service. If you look up a certain area, you can then view the image’s URL and use it to create a similar map. For example, you can look up a 25-mile radius around Denver, CO. The image URL you get is :


http://service.maptuit.com/htmlclient/map.cgi?-104.94180,39.72452,300,300,0,268.223333333333,1,Unique,0,Maps.Rad+m+x150,150+-104.94180,39.72452+r40233.5

Using this data, we can generate a custom request. The “300,300” is the image size. Let’s make that 1024, 768 for a bigger map (don’t go too big or it’ll refuse to generate a map). The 268.223~ is the zoom size. Let’s make it 100 for a closer look. the r40233.5 is the 25-mile radius in some other unit of measurement (latitude minutes, maybe…? I’m not sure). In any case, let’s divide that by 25 and times the result by 20 to get a 20-mile radius. You end up with:


http://service.maptuit.com/htmlclient/map.cgi?-104.94180,39.72452,1024,768,0,100,1,Unique,0,Maps.Rad+m+x150,150+-104.94180,39.72452+r32186.8

That gets you a 20-mile radius map around Denver, CO. If you can’t see the image, copy and paste the link into a new window instead of clicking on it – there might be some sort of referrer check that’s blocking you. You can see also see a saved copy here, but if all you want is one saved copy, an edited Google/Yahoo/MSN map will probably look better.

  • If you’re willing to pay $20, I heard that Google Earth Plus lets you draw these, but it’s not a website.

  • If it possible to make a custom Google Maps hack that draws circles. Here’s an example, but you have to be somewhat familiar with the Google Maps API and Javascript.