[xg]

Everybody's comments are pretty much on point. If you're contracting, you should be asking for $75-150 / hour. Shops like Pivotal Labs bill out their developers at $175 / hour (the firm obviously keeps a chunk of that).

I think your options are to try and take on some small contract work so you can keep working on your own projects -or- go work for a well known Rails environment (Pivotal, Gilt Groupe, etc) and work with a team to beef up your skills.

Even if you get a very junior development position at a slightly larger company, you'll probably still be looking at a > $75k annual salary.