https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0Dj9BmuICo

The short version: that live, face-to-face time on the show floor is the most expensive and most valuable thing you do all year. When someone walks past your booth, do they know who you are and what you do?

I did this for years, and it worked. If your booth isn't pulling its weight, that is part of what I do now.

The panel is called What's Happening, with two halves: Latest Answers (recently solved booms with the Operator's call in a pull-quote) and Active Discussions (every unresolved boom with chatter, lined up in a horizontal lane you can swipe through).

The button is still the button. Everything new lives below it.

A bunch of smaller things came along too. Every boom detail page now has a file-tab in the top-right showing the area and date. Recent Reports cards light up with a tier-colored glow pointing in the direction the boom came from. And the reactions row got custom icons that finally tie into the tower-and-wire metaphor. More on all of it in the dispatch log.

From the lookout tower.

The wire is on. Anyone in the Metro East is welcome at whattheboom.com, free and anonymous, and you can install it as a PWA if you want it on your home screen.

On phones the strip turns into a picker wheel. Swipe through time, the bar in the middle stays sharp, the others blur out around it. Like a lens passing over the timeline.

A few smaller things came along for the ride. The home page is now a live radar: booms slide in, the count ticks up, the pin lands on the mini-map without a refresh. The pulsing "you are here" dot follows you to every boom detail page now. And popups on the live map lead with the city.

The map remembers now. Free, anonymous, Metro East. Use it or install the PWA at whattheboom.com.

In the meantime, here's my beautiful wife and me on our 28th anniversary date last Saturday.

The view behind me near Post Commons in Alton, IL one day last week.

I traded a windowless basement with multiple monitors and a full greenscreen studio (cyc wall, 4k cameras, the works) for a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, and my truck.

And honestly? I love it. Between the sunroom at the house, local parks, and spots like Post Commons in Alton near the river bend, I don't struggle for focus or inspiration. Hot coffee, good WiFi, and a calendar that isn’t wall-to-wall meetings. It's amazing how much you can get done when the signal-to-noise ratio shifts in your favor.

Sure, the hills are steep, but look at the view from my parking spot at Post Commons this past week.

Had to snap a pic of the fresh Retrofit Engineering & Design decal on my laptop at Post Commons and send it to my friend Jesse who owns Retrofit.

And when I get stuck, I drive. Country roads are my muse. Time to take in some beauty, think, pray, and sort things out. Sounds like a waste of time when a hundred things are screaming for my attention, but it's the opposite. It's how I reset.

Hard season. Necessary season. Good season.

This is Rendered.

I spent years working with about forty different manufacturers, many of which had their own dealer or "partner" portals, and none of them necessarily made my life easier. Every portal had its own login, its own password rules, its own expiration schedule, and its own completely unique idea of where to put things. Spec sheets under "Resources" on one. "Marketing Assets" on another. "Dealer Tools" on a third. One of them had a tab called "Literature" that hadn't been updated since what I can only assume was the early 2010s.

And the product photos. I could write a whole separate post about the product photos. If your product image looks like it was taken on a folding table in a warehouse with a fluorescent light buzzing overhead, your dealers are not excited to sell that product. And when the image is postage-stamped size, it's not super helpful when trying to make your product look good on screen or in print.

The real problem is that these portals were built for the manufacturer's internal workflow, not for the people actually trying to sell their products. And when your partners have to fight through dozens of different logins and treasure hunts just to find a brochure, some of them are going to quietly stop fighting. They'll just sell the product from the manufacturer whose portal doesn't make them want to throw their laptop out a window.

This is fixable from both sides. If you're a manufacturer, your portal is your partner's first impression of what it's like to work with you. It should be at least as good as your product. And if you're a dealer or distributor drowning in logins, something as simple as one organized page in your own system, with every portal bookmarked, labeled, and annotated with where things actually live, can save your team real time every single day.

I build both of these now. The bar is shockingly low.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V7FxAFdGWvM

Back then it was bands abandoning their dot coms for MySpace (remember Tom?). Now it's small businesses treating their Facebook page like it's their website. Same mistake, different platform.

And honestly, the tools don't help. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Brevo, doesn't matter which one. They all give you a drag-and-drop editor that looks great in the preview and then lets you accidentally break your formatting, stretch an image, or send a test draft to your whole list. The templates are supposed to keep things consistent, but they're fragile, especially when more than one person is touching them.

But let's say the email looks fine. You hold your breath and hit Send. Now some unsubscribes roll in, and your heart sinks watching each one come through. It took me a while to learn that's completely normal, and that most of those people just had a bad day and cleaned out their inbox. Think about how many times you've done that yourself. It's not personal. It's just human behavior.

Most email anxiety isn't about the message. It's about the tool and the metrics you're staring at. The fix is a system that only lets you change what you're supposed to change, and knowing which numbers actually matter.

Then I needed to practice songs in a different key, so I built SetKey.

Then I needed to track expenses without bloated software I'd never fully use, so I built Account Rendered.

Three problems, three tools, zero subscriptions. Sometimes the best app is the one that only does what you actually need.

rendereddigital.io

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8n55uLT9mFA

I filmed a short video about what that moment has to do with starting something new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nsA8fwIUoc

I made a short video about why that's a trap.

The short version: once you start posting about these recurring days, your audience expects you to keep doing it every year. You're committing to something that's easy to start and hard to maintain.

What to do instead: let those moments live in your daily rhythm and inform your brand naturally, not as performative posts. An employee anniversary is a great excuse for an internal celebration and a genuine thank-you, not another content piece your followers have to scroll past.

If you're stuck thinking through decisions like this one for your own brand, that's the work I do at Rendered Consulting.

The new Rendered YouTube channel is a welcome sight on my phone this morning, after establishing and managing others’ more-established accounts for years.

On one hand, it’s like, “fresh, clean palette,” and on the other hand it’s the beginning of a long process to flesh out the channel with good content and getting it out to as many people as it can possibly help. I’ve got one video banked, with several more on the way, God willing!

Spread the word, and subscribe at youtube.com/@rendered_hq.

I made a short video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxa8j1vFc8E

The short version: the flag code is advisory, not criminal. But the people who care most, veterans, service members, their families, they see it. And around here in the Metro East, with Scott Air Force Base right down the road, that's a lot of your customers.

What to do instead: use red, white, and blue as colors and design elements. Just don't drape the actual flag over your sale banner.

SetKey for macOS

As a part-time bassist in the worship band at August Gate church, it was difficult for me to practice along with the reference track (usually on YouTube) of a song because it’s almost always in a different key than we plan to play it in.

For context, when I say what “key” the song is in, it’s kind of how low or how high of a pitch that the song starts in and stays in throughout. Sing the “Happy Birthday” song to yourself, starting in a low voice. Now start it in a high voice, and notice how much harder it might be to hit the higher notes as the song progresses.

In a similar way, when a worship leader or a band decides to play or compose a song, they’ll consider the person that’s going to be singing the lead on the song and where that person’s natural “range” is, so that they can comfortably sing the song from start to finish without struggling or their voice breaking. Then they’ll find the “key” for the song that provides that range.

Since the keys can vary so much, it was nearly impossible to practice alone at home on bass to a YouTube track that was in a different key than we were going to actually be playing it in. Not helpful.

So I built SetKey to detect the original key of the YouTube track, and then allow me to change the key of the playback so that I could play along.

This was a pre-release version of SetKey running on my MacBook Pro at home while I practiced bass this past Saturday.

That led to a nice looping feature that allowed me to woodshed on tricky parts and passages of a song without taking my hands off the bass. Which then led to the addition of MIDI footswitch capabilities that allow for total hands-free practicing of tracks.

Download it for free from setkey.app and try it if you think it’ll help you prepare for service, a gig, or just to help you practice personally. Let me know if you like it, and share the link!

https://setkey.app

I started a company called Rendered. There are two arms to it: consulting and digital product engineering.

Rendered Consulting is where I work with businesses directly. Brand, marketing, web. I sit across from an owner, figure out what they actually need, and build it. No templates, no WordPress, no five vendors when one person can see the whole picture. If your business deserves better than what it's got online, that is the work I do.

Rendered Digital is the product side. Free tools and custom apps, built from scratch. A password generator. A pitch transposer for musicians. A community reporting app for the Metro East. More on the way!

I've been building toward this for a while. The "big things afoot" from last week. Now they have a name!

If you're curious what I'm focused on at any given point, I keep a /now page updated.

If it weren't for a couple of goofy spiders I'd say it was picture perfect.

And a gang of pickle-ballers sounded like they were gettin' it done close by. Spring has definitely sprung.

Speaking of building:

Big things are afoot. Can't wait to share them! ⏳

Like our friend Bob Ross here, I decided to start with a blank canvas.

So I wiped the slate clean. Every post, every article, everything. New fonts, warm colors, clean layout. I wanted something anyone could land on and immediately understand. No clever ambiguity, no inside jokes. Just a personal hub that works.

I typed "Hello, world!" and hit Post.

By that evening I was trying to paste a photo from my iPhone into the editor, and Apple's file picker was driving me up a wall. So I built paste-to-upload. Copy a photo, paste it into the note, done. Then drag-and-drop. Then the photos wouldn't display in the browser, and the ones that did were sideways. So I fixed both.

One feature led to the next. That's how it goes.

Two days in, I got locked out of Facebook.

Old phone number on the two-factor authentication and no way back in. The timing was almost funny; here I was building my own publishing platform, and the one I'd actually been using just locked me out. No human to talk to. Just submit a picture of my ID and wait.

If your business or your church or your community lives on someone else's platform, you know the feeling.

It made the site feel less like a side project and more like a necessity.

Over the next week I added video embeds, audio players, an RSS feed, emoji reactions, topic tags—all the stuff that makes a site feel alive. But the features weren't the point. The posts were.

I drove out to the old house on Steppig Road where my old band used to rehearse in the early nineties. It's gutted now — dark and quiet. But I stood across the road and could almost hear us in that basement. I wrote about it from the truck, pasted in the photos, dropped in an old MP3 from one of those sessions, and embedded the General Lee horn on YouTube — because we used to hit that railroad crossing at full speed on the way out there.

I wrote about Gladys, our first band van. I wrote about the church buildings in Granite City where I first played worship music — borrowed spaces, coffee shops, a youth center.

It's been nice to chronicle some of the random drives lately. Here's a pic from the driver's seat in Granite City the other day.

The stories finally had a home that wasn't someone else's platform.

Then a close friend who has issues with his vision came to mind. And I couldn't just keep building without considering him and other visually impaired visitors.

I ran three accessibility audits, found a long list of failures, and fixed them one at a time. Seven rounds, each verified before moving on. Color contrast. Screen reader labels. Focus indicators. Keyboard navigation.

It's the kind of work nobody notices when it's done right. That's the point.

The site is a custom Node.js build — Express, EJS templates, PostgreSQL. No React, no static site generator. Just a server that renders HTML and a stylesheet I can read top to bottom. The whole thing had to be dead simple to use — paste a photo, type some words, hit Post — or I was never going to use it. Eight days of building, ten posts published, and a place I actually want to use.

It's not done. It's never done. But it's my little spot.

If you're thinking about building your own: start with a post, not a design. Write the song first; arrange it later.

And if you'd rather have someone build it for you, let's talk.

I have to admit that I’m kind of out of my element at Fantasy Books and similar stores, but my kids have always liked checking them out over the years, so I’ve spent quite some time perusing their aisles and oddities.

The youngest enjoying some browsing, like his two older brothers before him.

The gameroom rules sign forbidding body odor was a first, though. 🤣

(Not my photo, but I thought a door to nowhere was appropriate imagery here.)

So now I'm back in. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, ultimately? 🤔

Remember to keep your contact info updated across social media platforms—especially for the two-factor authentication stuff.

Driving down the familiar street that I traveled to and from that end of Granite City for a few years.

From around 2012 and up until 2016, my life was a whirlwind of ministry in and around Granite City, IL. And I admit that, being from Belleville, I never had a real fondness for Granite outside of the old east-side Vintage Vinyl record store that used to live there next to a really good Chinese restaurant that I'd patronize from time to time over the years. It was the steel mill and the whole vibe of the city and its history that I didn't understand when I was younger, but I grew to know and appreciate the more I served and hung out there with friends and people from the community.

I never actually served at this church (St. Bartholomew in Granite City), but this is where I was baptized along with Jenna Flores and Aaron Williams by James Amos while Jake Gehret played acoustic guitar and sang. It was a crazy, beautiful night, and my wife and kids were there with me to celebrate new life in Christ!

Soon after I posted something on Facebook one day long ago out of the blue that hinted that I'd believed the Gospel of Jesus Christ and had been saved, an old friend-of-friends (now one of my dearest friends in this life and the eternal life to come) James Amos reached out to me about helping with audio and video at a new church plant he was leading in Granite City called The Resurrection. As an energized, zealous, new believer set free from sin, death, hell, and the grave—and already headlong into multimedia production at the time—I jumped at the chance.

This church body was kind enough to let us meet in their building at a time when they weren't using it. The building is currently occupied by C3GC.

Next thing my family and I knew, we were attending service at The Resurrection's first official public gathering spot. We borrowed some space during off-peak hours at an established church, and my family and I first started hearing solid, real-life preaching straight out of the Bible in realtime and in person. James was the pastor and started with—of all books—the Gospel of Mark. I was running sound and recording, editing, and posting the sermons on a custom WordPress website that I built and maintained called TheResChurch.com.

A snapshot of how the old Resurrection website looked on August 29, 2012, thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Fast forward not very long at all (weeks, probably), and we had a worship band formed and rehearsing in my garage. The abrupt segue from playing in rock and blues bands since about 1986 was a bit of a shock to my system. And my ego, and all kinds of things. But it was so refreshing, and it's become clear that it's what I was created to do, and that the Lord had been preparing me for just such a time.

The first time I ever played my black Dynasty drum set (the same drums I'd played at every show and on every recording since the Frostbidding album recording sessions circa 1996) inside a church was in another old building we rented from a local congregation, sometime after moving on from the original location. This new, bigger space offered lots of opportunities for a full worship band to set up. That very first time, though, I set up my drums on the floor right in front of the pews, flanked by bass, guitar, and vocals, and to this day I can still picture myself trying not to play at FPM velocity in that new environment. It was the beginning of a truly fulfilling, enlightening, and encouraging journey in musicianship and discipleship.

This is what the old church building looks like today. It's an arts center now.

Suddenly, I was applying all the skills and knowledge I'd banked during all my years of bands and business toward Gospel ministry, and seeing God doing incredible things all around me in Granite City and beyond. I was thrown into a mix of musicians and singers from all walks of life, ages, and backgrounds, and I have learned so much from the whole process. I've grown as a musician, a person, and a disciple of Christ along the way—and I'm still learning and growing daily. I love the diversity of talent, styles, and personalities that I get to play music and worship with from week to week and year to year.

This former Methodist church is now The Mill live event venue.

After meeting there for a while, we ended up moving down the street about a block or so to the spot that's now The Mill live event venue, where we met for quite a while—across the upstairs and downstairs of the facility, again renting some space from the congregation there at the time during their off hours.

Somewhere in there, I stepped away for a season to lead worship at Discovery Family Church in Collinsville before finding my way back to The Resurrection.

The current location of the former Kool Beanz coffee shop near the movie theater and across from that little park.

We then met at what was then called Kool Beanz, a coffee shop owned by members of The Resurrection at the time, in the downtown area. We'd move the tables and chairs on Sunday morning while the actual coffee shop was closed for business, and we'd set up the full band and worship from there for a season.

After service, we'd move everything back to where it was, and it was business as usual for Kool Beanz.

The last location of The Resurrection church before it merged into August Gate Church at the end of 2015, beginning of 2016.

Next up was the building that was formerly a youth center just a few blocks away from Kool Beanz and downtown.

The Resurrection met in the left half of this building, first in the wide-open space upstairs, and then downstairs in that same space after a bit of cleanup and remodeling. This was the last official meeting place of The Resurrection church, as we merged into the existing August Gate Church after a lot of thought, prayer, and planning at the end of 2015.

At that point, I joined the music ministry at August Gate on drums and bass guitar, and have served at the former South St. Louis location (which split from August Gate a few years ago to become Church of the Redeemer), as well as at the former and the current (and now only) Metro East location.

While at August Gate Church, we went through a season of trying to plant an August Gate in Granite City, and we met in another church congregation's building there who (familiar story at this point) let us use their space when they weren't using it. It was great while it lasted, but plans pivoted, and we ended up with one, firm location in Belleville, IL where the church currently meets.

This was the one and only August Gate Church location in Granite City. AG is currently meeting at one location only, in Belleville, IL.

We didn't meet in Granite City as August Gate for long, but sometime during my current time serving at the Belleville location, I had the opportunity to sub on drums a couple of times at R-Church in Granite City—which was the last time, to date, that I've been involved in ministry in GC.

R-Church in Granite City.

Sometime in there, I remember subbing on drums at a church that used to meet in a space tucked behind the Apple Tree Family Restaurant shopping center. I believe it was called Tapestry Church or something similar.

The Tapestry gathering met back here in half of this building.

For a town I knew nothing about when I was younger, it's truly amazing how the Lord kept calling me back to Granite City over and over, it seemed. I dug in, and I learned to love the city, the people, and Jesus more and more every day I spent serving there alongside some good friends and church family—many who are now just a sweet memory and have passed on, either through death or just the course of life.