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

.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.

Well, turns out I needed /index.php for my not-so pretty links. So my about page is: http://edgargarcia.com/index.php/about/ WTF??? Yeah.

Research lead me to einar’s post Pretty WordPress Permalinks on IIS and with some modifications, I got it to work. It takes the port number to find the size but my query string doesn’t have the port. I changed ‘:80′ to ‘.com’ and +3 to +4. This worked for me and no more /index.php in my path.

Thanks einar!