My office looks a lot different since starting Rendered.
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.
I've been saying this for over twenty years, and it's still as relevant now as it was in 2002.
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.
It feels strange to go from the channel I started and grew to several thousand followers over the past few years to a fresh, new one for my own company, Rendered.
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!
I liked my old website. Terminal aesthetic, green-on-black, BBS vibes. It was nerdy and nostalgic for me, and I was proud of it. But it was built for a specific season, and that season was over.
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.
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.
