Rémino: 1, Bank street: 0

Take that, Bank Street!  The remake of my site Rémino ended up not lasting longer than all the work done downtown since the past few years.  Since I’m heading for Japan this year, it’s safe to say that I’ll never see Bank street, or rather “Bankrupt street”, as I like to call it, completely open during summer.

It is also time to finish all the projects I had on the back burner since a while, and not drag those plans with me in Japan.  This is the first time I’ve worked really hard on any of my personal sites to accomplish a product that works and can be really enjoyed by myself and others.  Here are a few features on the new Rémino:

• Beautiful and cleaner soothing design, with slightly bigger font for easier reading.
• Sharing interesting posts on the site is now easier thanks to “Share” links provided by ShareThis.
• Content in French and Japanese is now separated from the English version of the site to clear up some clutter from people who can’t read all these languages.  The default language you’ll see now depends on your browser.  (If you’re in Japan, for example, you’ll most likely see the site in Japanese first.)  Although the content is segragated everywhere, it is all merged into one single RSS feed, for simplicity.
• People may now log in or create an account on Rémino using their Open ID (MyOpenID, LiveJournal, Flickr, Google, etc.) or Facebook account.
• The footer of every page now has more content, with a map for the site, my recent activity on Twitter and elsewhere online (recorded on FriendFeed).
• Some photos among those in my Flickr account are picked randomly on every page and displayed in the footer and background.

For all the geeks like me out there, the site is now running on Drupal 6.  I was using WordPress 2.7 before, but decided to go back with Drupal, and upgraded my older Drupal 5 installation, while migrating everything I wrote with WordPress to not lose any content.  The site has been tested and tried in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 3, Opera, Safari 3 and 4, and Google Chrome.

I took time to build something that I can proudly show to other people now, if not for their personal interest and curiosity, at least for the quality work now making it into my professional portfolio.  I’ve also taken care of making it much more enjoyable for me to write posts and upload pictures on my site, so updates will be more frequent.

I’m really proud of what I’m done, and I hope you’ll like it as much.  Thanks to my friends who have tested this site and waited for me to get everything done.  I should also thank the open source community for their great software powering this.  Please leave your comments or contact me directly to let me know what you think about the new Rémino.

I have many other projects in the works right now, so you’ll be seeing more creations from me soon!