After seeing this marvelous bit of hackery I've subscribed to blog. Anyone with that level of curiosity must certainly have other interesting knowledge to share.

Yes, there are. Follow the link and notice the redirect embeds params for the affiliate link.

Yikes, I stand correct. Thank you.

I'm the author. Feel free to email me anything at rbitar [at] gmail.

I was using SendGrid for email delivery and needed to upgrade the plan since I reached my limit. It should work now.

Good idea. I'll add a GitHub field.

I don't think I've removed any profiles. I can look into this if you like.

"I don't think I've removed any profiles. "

Oh I didn't mean to say you did. Maybe I removed it myself (from the original spreadsheet) I don't remember.

"I can look into this if you like."

Thanks for the offer but please don't bother. Not important at all.

Right, thats the best way for now. If you still have trouble, feel free to email me (email is on my profile).

I did receive a few error messages when editing my profile. They just said that the owner of the site had received a notification and to check product.log It happened when I was attempting to edit my rate.

After a few tries it worked. I think it might have been related to entering too much text in the rate field, because when I shortened my explanation it worked just fine.

Correct, the rate is a string field so has a 255 char limit. It was mostly intended for short values such as "$100 / hr"

Its a text based search and I'm working on some simple query expansion to resolve SF / Bay Area / San Francisco type queries as the same. There are still a few open questions for implementing proximity search ...

A simple approach is to just geocode all the locations to a lat/lon and do a proximity search using WGS84. If someone has a location entry in their profile that fails geocoding, put up a warning the next time they login telling them that their location was not resolved and they should update it.

Don't worry about queries like "SF" or "Bay area"... if it's not good enough for the geocoder to resolve the location, just return an error message.

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/

If you do implement this, you should release the source code.

A handful of projects need a tool that allows GIS over text locations.

At the moment "more complete" profiles are ranked higher. But I agree, there should be some randomization introduced.

Hey Ben,

I created hnhackers a few hours after the spreadsheet was posted on HN. Here is my original post on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264544

I thought this would be a better way for us HN consultants to connect, but I'm happy to remove you from the DB if you prefer. My email is in my profile.

note that I've addressed most of the issue in the original post but let me know if you have any other feedback.