How about a little custom(?) microformat on our "about" sections that you fetch and refresh every X days? That solves the authentication and updating problems. That's not my idea either. It's what the Perlmonks starting doing maybe 7 years ago.
Good idea. I've added it to my user page, except that I am using degrees rather than degrees.minutes.seconds. (Doesn't that make more sense?)
There might be a bit of a problem though: there's no easy way to enumerate user IDs except by crawling the threads. Maybe for simplicity we should still have to add our usernames to HackrTrackr if we want to be included.
I think this combination is a great idea. Thanks guys. I'll rework some stuff to make this possible. I really appreciate all the suggestions that have been made over the past 24 hours. I thought only a few people where going to sign up and already 130 have submitted their user names. Also based upon the suggestions, I'm going to add a location based forum, as well as rework the interface to show the selected user's information in a pop up bubble, with a link to the state list instead of instantly redirecting people. Thanks, again for the suggestions and please feel free to keep them coming.
<!-- location:latitude=34.05.14,longitude=-84.16.05 -->
http://tinymicros.com/pm/index.php?goto=BigMonkMap
More inspiration from the Perl Mongers:
http://www.pm.org/groups/map.html