This hilarious parody of Bruno Mars’ club hit Grenade, was written and directed by Payman Benz. Payman is of Awkward Pictures, which includes Sean Becker, and known for their comedic genius.

Payman approached me a while back wanting to set up a website with his videos and information about him. A very simple site was what he wanted.

I quickly suggested he should seek out wordpress templates, which he took to heart because I started getting links to templates he liked. “Can you make some changes to this template? Is that hard?” were some of the companion questions I’d get.

I’ve had about a good hour max of facetime with Payman in the past so I didn’t really know him too well. I am a fan of his work, and he’s heard of me through Sean and the work I do for The Guild. I quickly realized that this man has his head on straight. Particularly with what he wants with his site. Perfect!

Ultimately, he found the template which did what he wanted and had the basic look he needed. He also asked me if I could work on this and get it done by today. He had a new music video he was uploading and wanted to coincide his site launch with it. I said, “Sure!”

Payman sent me everything I asked for. And even stuff I didn’t. He gave me good quality photos for his thumbnails and a list of his videos, separated into the categories he wanted. He even went as far as create photoshop mock images of his site. The man made things SUPER easy for me to set up.

The other reason for this blog post is because I came across an issue while working on this template. Half of Payman’s videos are on Funny or Die. That website is usually not supported in plugins or anything video-related. YouTube, Vimeo, self-hosted files, is usually as far as they go. This template was the same. I looked at the functions, and figured out how it worked and actually added support for FoD. It also came with prettyPhoto, a javascript library for opening up lightbox-like views of pictures and videos. I added FoD support for that as well.

It felt good to be able to do something like that, and do quickly also. I remember back in the days when I would spend hours trying to dissect code for Felicia or The Guild to fix something or make it work how we needed it.

Anyway, http://paymanbenz.com is up. Check it out. Watch Payman’s old content on there, I spent some of my time last night going through it. Some I hadn’t ever seen before, while some I had seen many times over. Feel free to comment by clicking on the title of a video and going to the page.

Thanks Payman for giving me the opportunity to help you with something creative, and then making the whole experience pretty phenomenal.

Short URL: http://is.gd/GRENADE

Watch the video, then check out the page I created for them: http://superHarmony.com.

Short URL: http://is.gd/superHarmony

I’ve asked around for some fun design work and people have responded. I will discuss them all in time but I wanted to point this one out since there was a blog post with it and I can link to it.

Matt Brackney has been doing some work for The Guild and I asked if he would cartoonify me as a Guild character and he did! He’s awesome at this stuff, though I do kinda wish my character had glasses like me and maybe the braided beard was just my goatee since they tend to identify me the most (though I am not one to complain about this), its a wonderful drawing for sure! Check it out here on Squareternal.

I’ve had others work on some items for me and I hope to create a separate page to showcase some of these things. Particularly, Katie Durham‘s wonderful idea for a change in my blog.

If anyone else has anything Edgar-related they want to show me or want me to showcase please let me know… I get a kick out of all of this creativity I have been shown… especially when its about me.

Edgar

http://atleahjones.com

Here I go again, opening my not-so-big-mouth and getting myself more work. I am one of a trio of people currently working on the next Twitter-inspired social media experiment.

You heard right, it is a dating site, of sorts. See my Twitter life, as short as it has been, has been very fruitful. I’ve avoided adding people myself, and most of them have for one reason or another added me first. Leah Jones is one such woman.

Leah is a blogger, and on Twitter and other social sites. Recently, one of her tweets was about her friend, trying to set him up on a date. Ten days ago… She then continued by reinforcing how serious she was that same night. A few days later, she updated us on her successful possible matchmaking. This is where I come in. I engage her by asking how much her matchmaking services are, then mention how a leahjonesdating site would solve all those problems. This quickly grew to what it almost is now. I say that because it is and will be a work in progress for a while.

Currently, you can see a splash logo/page here http://atleahjones.com that Ezra Butler, from Jerusalem, one of Leah’s many friends/contacts, created. He is working on the design. I am working on the guts/tech, and Leah will be the pretty face to this project. She will also take the biggest role by seriously interviewing her friends first, then slowly adding others, by blogging about them and giving them her seal of approval. Leah will be featuring people from all walks of life, it won’t be a set type, I mean, I will probably definitely be showcased. We’re working out the kinks on how to handle communications, but as I said, work in progress.

Leah’s recent blog post is about this and is called Building a Better Dating Site. I think giving it the personal touch Leah will be giving, is the secret to building a better dating site. I’ve had to learn how to set up an image map to link our Twitter accounts on the existing splash page. I also had to figure out how to set up an email relay to work with the blog. Since I am hosting it. I may end up moving it though.

.sidebar = class=”sidebar”

#sidebar = id=”sidebar

Anyway, this was “fun” but at least I can figure out the layout problems… Oh, and I edited all the needed images to make it look better.

Task complete.

I’m missing a sidebar.  Its a nice template, but no place to add other things like widgets.

I have one of two things I can do. I can look for a new template and leave this nice theme of a template, or I can work on editing this baby and converting it to a widget-ready sidebar extravaganza.  I’m leaning towards converting it and becoming a WordPress Template Master.

It will give me some of the innerworkings of the templating system used here, but I am worried that others may want to exploit these future abilities.

I guess only time will tell.

In her recent blog, This Place Looks Better! she writes about my part in updating her website once again, and if you haven’t noticed, she’s moved on up to a dot com. Not that there’s anything wrong with dot net (Ruby on Rails all the way!).

Funny thing’s that she really does it all. Heck, what little I do for her is mainly because I slowly usurped it from her. Poor woman need an assistant, she does it all. Then again, that’s her job, isn’t it? Me? I have a day job.

So how did I end up in this situation? Well, it was a crazy random happenstance.

It started off with a very strange random youtube search where I found The Guild – Episode 1: Wake-Up Call. It lead me to her website where my nerdyness found some misspellings… I emailed her, also suggested should she have “website questions” she could ask… she did.

Question answered, I conceded to being a Flog reader.  She had just started blogging. I kept commenting about getting her to install forums. She seems very approachable… since she acquiesced.  I think its partly why she is and will be a huge success.

I shortly became the moderator of the forums, then quickly admin to help her completely moderate her forums, since I asked for the forums.

From there, she needed help updating her other website, http://www.watchtheguild.com. This is how it all began. I wanted to help her however I could so that she had more time to devote to her guild project (which I loved) and to whatever other projects she had.

I like that she’s made it a fan-centric web series, and I think that helped her garner three distinct internet awards. SXSW: On Networks Greenlight Awards, Yahoo! Video Awards: Best Series, and 2007 Youtube Awards: Best Series. Not too shabby.

So, here I am, working for “the man”, “the man” being a beautiful red-head, with a genius mind, from social networking/self-promoting, to writing, producing, and starring in a hit web series. This star is rising, and rising fast. That’s a good thing, because we will be privy to some wonderful performances like her recent one in Joss Whedon’s entry into the internet web series domain that is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog as Penny, co-starring with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.

In case anyone wondered, there’s my story. I got lucky, and I know that this luck can always run out. My main goal is friendships. Hers, and/or the people I have been meeting on her forums. I need to expand my friend network.

I’ve been recently working on helping a friend with her blog/website and thought I should fix mine up so i can have an actual web presence.

As for content, I will figure that out as I move along. I’m hoping that I will write something and keep my creative juices flowing. I haven’t done much of the things I desire recently and with this, I hope I can begin to do so.

For lack of a better title (aside my name) I’m calling this Edgar of all trades because I seem to dabble in everything, or at least I am able to help in nearly everything. Funny thing is that I tend to excel in what I focus on. Master of all? Maybe. I don’t know, I’ll have to see. I do love helping people out. This skill may come in handy.

- Edgar