As far as gigs/jobs, check out:

http://siliconflorist.com/jobs/

Salaries are on the lower end, but so is cost of living here. Lightbox to avoid SAD not included.

The Portland Seed Fund is launching this summer, which might bring some sexiness to the startup scene. COLORlovers just got 1mil and so did ShopIgnitor a few months back. So there is some action here for sure.

Portland is a big digital media agency town. Webtrends is here and lots of SEO/online marketing shops. GetClicky is here as well (go analytics!).

Not sure about interview questions.

I just hired a PHP dev strait from school at 50K/year. Hope that helps. Good luck.