@jenniferDewalt, Great job on the site, I also found your original 180 websites inspirational. I was wondering if you could speak to the technology stack you used to create your site frontend/backend?
The restaurant search feature uses the Google Places api to get restaurant data (including things like hours and price) for places that aren't already in the database. YumHacker uses Postgres with PostGIS for the database and devise for authentication.
The frontend magic happens with Backbone.js. Backbone latches onto the skeleton html sent over by Rails to render the views. Whenever you request new data, it sends a request to Rails which sends back JSON. The learning curve for Backbone was kind of high but now that I've got the hang of it, it's pretty awesome.
I plan to write something more in depth about the technology in the near future.