Twenty+ Years

Twenty-five years ago, I put my first real website online. It ran from a Fedora Linux server in the basement of my Montgomery Township home, connected to an RCN cable line with just enough bandwidth to get by. It was modest, but it gave me a place to learn, experiment, and build.

From 1999 to 2003, I ran a small consulting business called Williams Interactive, Inc. The site, hosted at williamsinteractive.com, lived on my residential broadband connection using DynDNS to map a changing IP address to the domain. Slow upload speeds often tested my patience, but running the site taught me invaluable lessons about reliability, performance, and keeping services online.

Camel POOP” – my article on Object Oriented Programming in Perl.

The Internet Archive still preserves snapshots of those early pages. They featured sections for Clients, Technology, Credentials, Publications, and Contact, along with the tagline: “Williams Interactive, Inc. – Seize the Internet.” The content reflected a belief I still hold today: open architectures and open-source software provide greater freedom and longevity than closed systems.

I was building web applications for clients including State Street Corporation, Merrill Lynch, Crestec Digital, and Johnson & Johnson. My toolset centred on Perl, CGI, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. One of the articles I published, Camel POOP, introduced object-oriented programming in Perl. Around the same time, I was earning BrainBench certifications in Perl, Unix shell scripting, Linux administration, JavaScript, HTML, and web development.

Credentials page showcasing BrainBench certifications, June 2002.

IBM developerWorks was another major influence. Its articles on reusable Perl applications, SOAP::Lite, and XML-RPC helped shape my understanding of what would later become web services.

By 2002, I had moved the site to Verizon DSL and registered khurt.com as a personal domain. It became a place to experiment with the emerging world of blogging, as platforms such as Blogger and Movable Type began to gain traction. WordPress arrived in 2003, just as I was winding down the consulting business and moving toward a career in cybersecurity.

Technology page highlighting our technical stack and the “lay waste to your competition” tagline.

In 2006, I registered islandinthenet.com, which remains my online home today. The name was inspired by Bruce Sterling’s 1988 novel Islands in the Net. As someone born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and trained in information theory and networks, the idea of maintaining a small, independent space on the Internet resonated deeply with me.

Over the years, islandinthenet.com has moved between hosting providers as I balanced performance, reliability, cost, and control. The technology evolved from hand-coded HTML and Perl CGI scripts to WordPress with ActivityPub, webmentions, and microformats2. The principles, however, have remained the same: own your content, use open standards, and build things that last.

Clients page featuring Crestec Digital, Merrill Lynch, and State Street Corporation.

The original williamsinteractive.com domain is gone, and khurt.com has long since passed into other hands, but the Internet Archive preserved much of that early work. Looking back, that basement Linux server was the start of a journey that continues today.

Twenty-five years later, my small island in the net is still here, quietly running in the background, waiting for anyone who happens to find it.