Khürt Williams

Khürt Williams is passionate about photography, open-source software, information security, and the open web. He makes a living as a Lead Cyber Security Architect for a financial services firm. He lives in Montgomery Township, New Jersey.

Elsewhere: GitHub, Gravatar

Contact: Email Khürt

Khürt Williams

I’m an information security professional with a background in technology R&D. I enjoy exploring wildlife photography and capturing nature through my lens.

Website

My website, Island in the Net, is where I share thoughts on technology, photography, coffee, craft ale, diabetes, and everyday life.

Over the years, I've experimented with platforms including UserLand Manila, Blogger, MoveableType, and WordPress.com before settling on self-hosted WordPress in 2005. My domain has been part of my online journey for over two decades.

I discovered the IndieWeb movement in 2017, which inspired me to integrate modern web standards like RSS, Webmention, Post Kinds, Syndication Links, ActivityPub, WebSub, Micropub, and IndieAuth using IndieWeb WordPress plugins. Currently running my custom Cornerstone theme built specifically for microformats2 compliance and IndieWeb integration.

Background

I've worked across electrical engineering (R&D), open-source software, system integrations, and cybersecurity. Prior to 2003, I focused on full-stack web development using Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, and JavaScript. Starting in 2003, my focus shifted toward systems and application security, leading to my role as an information security architect in 2013.

Itches

Better reply context handling and conversation threading
Native WordPress workflow for replying to Mastodon and webmention content
Initiate conversations with Mastodon users via Social Notes

Working On

Exploring improved photo metadata handling for wildlife photography posts
Testing webmention interactions with Mastodon instances

Projects

Cornerstone

Cornerstone is a minimalist WordPress theme I created to provide robust microformats2 support and seamless integration with IndieWeb plugins. Built from scratch rather than adapting existing commercial themes, Cornerstone treats IndieWeb standards as first-class features. The theme passes all IndieWebify.me validation tests and serves as my production theme on Island in the Net.

Key features:

Representative h-card and proper h-entry markup
Native webmention display and styling
ActivityPub likes/boosts display with Fediverse integration
Syndication links with u-syndication markup
Mobile-first, accessible design without framework bloat

The theme is open source (GPL v2) and available on GitHub for the IndieWeb community.

IndieWeb Wiki

To add a sparkline like the following for Khürt Williams, copy/paste: {{Islandinthenet.com}} into the page where you want it to appear. (For setup, see How to make a small h-card template and wikify#Wikify_yourself.)