About Chris Abraham

I'm Chris Abraham. Gerris Corp is my consultancy, and I'm the person who does the work. I've lived in the Washington, DC area since 1988 and work from South Arlington, in Arlington, Virginia. Clients like that I'm a US-based business, and I work with them across the country and the English-speaking world.

At a glance

What I do now

My primary coding assistants are OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. I use GitHub Copilot, Gemini, and Grok too, with Perplexity from time to time. Working across providers lets me choose an assistant to fit the assignment and compare its suggestions against evidence.

I'm a hands-on technical consultant whose deepest specialty is search. Clients bring me in when the technical side of their web presence needs someone in charge: I diagnose, scope, write the spec, direct the developers, human and AI, ship the parts I can ship myself, and explain it all to leadership in plain English. My technical SEO core covers on-page SEO, site speed, Cloudflare and CDN setup, 301 redirects, indexing, Google Search Console, and migrations. Around it I work as a fractional technical lead, rescue stalled projects, build small AI tools with Codex and Claude Code, clean up data, advise founders and executives, and manage the online reputation of people whose public record matters.

Every layer I work in, from servers and DNS to code, schema, and data, is listed with its proof on what I can take on in your stack.

Systems and platforms

I provision and harden my own Linux servers on DigitalOcean: key-only SSH, root and password login disabled, firewalls locked down, and unattended security updates. I run a self-hosted, encrypted file-sync system across my machines, a persistent terminal email setup over SSH, and my own command-line assistant, Blackbox. I've worked with WordPress for twenty years, including Elementor, Avada, Rank Math, and WooCommerce, and with Shopify and Liquid, Magento 2 and Hyvä, Umbraco, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, Duda, Wix, Webflow, Framer, and React and Next.js applications, with Sanity, Vercel, and Netlify on the headless side, and with Cloudflare, GA4, and Search Console throughout. I've also worked under HIPAA and nondisclosure agreements on a healthcare site.

Career

• Employee number 13 at New Media Strategies, where online reputation management grew up as a practice.
• Senior account supervisor on Edelman's digital public affairs team in Washington, where I vetted online influencers for a genuine, multi-year track record before clients engaged them.
• Co-founder of Abraham Harrison, launched with Mark Harrison in 2007.
• Founder of Gerris Corp, started with Dan Krueger in 2012.
• Reputation and executive privacy work at Reputation.com.
• In 1996, a member of the Proxima team (later Proxicom) that launched Owens Corning's Pink Panther website, a deep, interactive site with a homeowner discussion forum that took the first BOTI award for Best Web Site Design (press release, archived).
• Earlier, work with Howard Rheingold at Rheingold Associates, and internet infrastructure work in the Treasury Department's Office of the CIO, on an intranet where the job was the reverse of SEO: keeping every spider and bot out.

Technical background

I was a programmer before I was a marketer: Perl, PHP, Python, and C. I've built websites since 1994: a site for my father's company, Pacific Rim Productions, plus urban.net and MemeSpace, and an early run of self-hosted publishing tools, from Greymatter blogs and Movable Type's Perl CGI scripts to PHP-Nuke and PostNuke portals. My first optimization was for my own sites, before Google existed: getting them listed in the web directories of the day, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves among them, and mentioned across Usenet and the early forums. By 1998 that meant on-page work too: keyword targeting, meta tags, titles, and how each page was structured. I have run chrisabraham.com on Plone, a Python CMS, since the early 2000s. Today I work in Git, on Linux servers over SSH, and alongside AI coding assistants, building my own tools for research, publishing, and task management.

Online community

I published the Memetic Lexicon on memes.org in 1999, ran the MemeSpace community, which The New York Times profiled, and founded and moderate a Reddit community for slow joggers. I was a member of The WELL, eWorld, and ArtsWire. Two decades of watching ideas spread and mutate online shapes how I approach reputation work today.

Writing

I have a BA in American Literature from The George Washington University, with a year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. I captained my high school speech and debate team, taught creative writing, and write every day. That training shows up in the work: appeals built like briefs, reports that explain the mechanism plainly, and pages that say what they mean.

Verify

• My Upwork profile, with client reviews and work history: Top Rated, 100% Job Success.
• chrisabraham.com, my personal site and archive since the early 2000s.
• hillmole.com, my serialized novel and a working example of a migration.
• The source code of this site.

Gerris is distinct from chrisabraham.com: this site covers the consultancy and its services, and chrisabraham.com is my personal archive and writing.

The name

Gerris lacustris is the common water strider, the insect that skates across the surface of ponds. Why I chose it, and the story of the logo Oliver Uberti drew for it, are in the colophon.

Updated October 15, 2026