There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.
If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.
