Me
Hi there, Internet.
My name is Gabriel Bliss. I am a 22 year old student of web development currently attending Portland Community College. I am also very interested in personal fitness (ignore the empty beer mug) and so I love to spend my free time in the gym and out running in the sunshine.
I currently live 10 miles outside beautiful Portland, Oregon in a suburb named Hillsboro. I have been lucky enough to travel the world, and there is one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; and that is I will never be able to call another city my home. I love Oregon to bits.
Go Blazers! Go Timbers! Go Winterhawks!
Experience
I have lots of experience in the world of web design. I have been working with CSS/XHTML since high school, and I've played around with basic HTML since long before that. I've always had a passion for it. During my high school years I became very interested in forum development and forum software to support groups of gamers who I befriended over the years. I operate two forums currently, they both recieve thousands of hits a day.
This forum is built on the popular open source webforum platform MyBB, which I have found to be extremely flexible and customizable.
One aspect of this forum that proved to be a challenge was the large amount of people who natively spoke several different languages, and needed to communicate with English-only speakers. I managed to find a plugin that uses the Google Translate API to filter all custom content through it's auto-translation service. I have found this service to be exceptional as far as free translators go, and this forum has grown and flourished for several years within the eRepublik community.
This forum is also built on the MyBB platform, and was modeled after my other forum with a few custom changes.
One very challenging aspect of this webforum was that the core community had been operating together without a forum for several years before I came along. It took a lot of convincing and reassurances that I know what I'm doing to get them all to move and get used to the change; but I know that they feel they made the correct choice because not only has their community flourished but also gained a lot more legitimacy in the eyes of their fellow gamers. Like my previous example, there are several people who do not speak English. I solved this problem with some handy HTML injection to fool the forum into thinking users had changed their defult language setting by clicking on the flags of countries. So far it has ran for almost a year and a half with very few modifications.
This website was developed for a client operating a proofwriting website for college students.
One very challenging aspect of developing this website was creating a method for people to purchase my client's services. I used Paypal to handle the secure transfer of bank and credit card information, and a form processing script to email all details of the project to my client's email address. This is a very detailed and professional website, and I feel proud of my work. As always I made sure every page conforms to strict XHTML/CSS standards.
Contact
Fill out the form below to leave me a message! If you are interested in hiring me please use the Hire Me! page.
