myweku.com

In the second part of our series on African Photo Sharing sites MyWeku finds out more about the people behind Mokocharlie.com.

According to the two talented pioneers the website’s name which is a combination of English and Ga (a Ghanaian Local Language) refers to a ‘best friend or a good buddy’, and was built to showcase and share interesting photos. The site went live on 5th February 2009. As at now 1954 images have been uploaded so far.

Kwabena Aning told Myweku that “I started out developing websites in 2000 and haven’t stopped since. I am always looking for that next challenge that pushes my abilities that much further, especially in anything that has anything to do with Web Services, and scripting languages such as Python, PHP, XML derivatives, Javascript and with a keen inclination towards Model-View-Controller frameworks and Information Architecture. I am responsible for all the code and infrastructure that mokocharlie.com runs on so when anything breaks on there, I’m the one to talk to about the plumbing” he added “From my perspective, I was looking for a lasting challenge, one that we could build from the ground up and make work. My main inspiration was the challenge of building something that was going to have global visibility and also something that could be associated with those big projects out there. A web service that we could be proud of but at the same time be something that we were proud to say was Ghanaian. When I heard about Mokocharlie, it was like “this is the project” and I have been hacking at it ever since”

Kwaku Chintoh, who has been touring the various resorts in Ghana every weekend to take photographs and promote mokocharlie also intimated that “More often than not tourists and holiday makers that visit our country take beautiful pictures and keep them on their computers. They later create an album on their laptops, email them to friends or upload them on other social networks that are exclusive to members only.

Also, Ghanaians in the Diaspora often wonder how their communities look like on their sojurn abroad. Mokocharlie serves as a global photo album that they can access to re-familiarise themselves with their homelands. It is fair to assume that locals will also benefit immensely from Mokocharlie as they are able to access photos of interesting places within Ghana and other places that they may not have had the chance to visit”.

More features were added to the site in November 2009. Users are now able to accept twitter and facebook accounts as valid logins for Mokocharlie. They are also able to upload and comment without moderation on the website and without having to register to use the site.

The two pioneers have also rewritten parts of their search engine for more intelligent search results. They have included a “search within this album” feature on the Album view page. This means that users can search within an album for images. They have also integrated an open search facility into the website. This means that users can actually search Mokocharlie without being at Mokocharlie.com. By visiting Mokocharlie for the first time users are given the option of installing a search plug-in into their browser. This is supported by all the major browsers. Users can type in any search keyword from their browser search plug-in and get results from Mokocharlie.com.

Also, in the November redevelopment they included some client-side scripts, and some asynchronous features, which means that users can go about doing little things on pages without having to load the entire page. Things like posting comments and rating images now happen independently of the entire image pages.

Kwaku and Kwabena also told Myweku that “We are developing a market platform that will run in parallel to Mokocharlie.com. It’s at the alpha stage right now. Companies or “traders” as we call them on the platform will be able to create accounts and log in as normal, and will be able to post adverts that will appear dynamically on Mokocharlie.com. We will also have an intelligent tagging system which will enable our “traders” to determine what images and/or albums will promote their images (we are really excited about this so stay tuned).

Another feature which we will be pushing out pretty soon after the market platform goes live, will be a REST Based Advert Syndication Service, which will allow other websites to retrieve advert data from us for their own purposes as well. By showcasing your products on the site, one is able to reach other nationals easily. Our statistics indicate that a significant proportion of the site’s visitors come from outside Ghana”.

Those who would want to upload their photographs on Mokocharlie can do so here

See Also

African Photo-sharing Sites – Part 1

African Photo-Sharing Sites – Part 3

African Photo-Sharing Sites – Part 4