Nina and Ada went to Mr. Peebles’s place to talk to Tycho. Mr. Peebles’s lab was still crammed with hardware from the wheelchair project. There had been a path about wheelchair width cleared from the doorway to the desk and around the edge of the room, but the rest of the floor was covered in metal parts.
Tycho opened up the latest version of Nina’s portfolio and showed Ada some of the code he used to implement the new features.
“I’ve made comments throughout the code explaining what each command does,” Tycho explained. “Most of this I found online from someone who had already created something similar. I just tweaked it a bit.”
It suddenly seemed so much simpler to Ada with his explanations. She wished she’d known that sometimes you can just find the code you need from a basic Google search. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel (or the website!). That’s what was great about the coding community—they were usually willing to share their work.
“Your old site is still up now. This is a saved version of the new one. But if you’re okay with what I’ve done, we can make this one live today,” Tycho told Nina.
He opened up the front page of Nina’s portfolio, which still looked essentially the same. He scrolled through Nina’s artwork and clicked on a painting. On the top of the page, Ada noticed there was an addition to the toolbar. It said Show This Piece.
“So you just click here,” said Tycho, “and you have the option to upload a photo of your space.”
He uploaded a photo of Mr. Peebles’s lab.
“Then you enter the dimensions of the wall here.” He entered ten feet by twelve feet into the appropriate box. “Voilà!” The painting appeared in the picture of the lab. It showed what it would look like over the workbench where they were sitting. But it completely blocked the window in the photo.
“Wow. That painting looks great over the workbench,” said Ada.
Tycho laughed. “Yeah, we don’t really need that window anyway! Once it’s in there, though, you can move it wherever. Just drag it around until it’s where you want it.” He dragged it so it was next to the window.
“It’s even better than I imagined!” said Nina. “Thanks so much, Tycho.”
“Well, you know, Ada did a great job on this site. She made it really easy for me.”
“Thank you, Ada,” said Nina. Ada smiled gratefully at Tycho.
“It looks like you already have a bit of traffic for the site you have up already,” said Tycho. “And with these new headings I’ve included, the new site will have much better SEO, so you should see more traffic right away.”
Ada and Nina read some of the new title tags on her page: San Francisco Artwork, San Francisco Local Young Artist, Affordable Artwork in the City.
“What’s SEO?” asked Nina.
“Search engine optimization,” said Ada. “It just means that people who search for things similar to those headings will have an easier time finding your page through Google.”
“Cool!”
They spent some time refining things. By the end of an hour the site was ready to go, and Nina seemed back to her happy self.
“Who needs Guy Miroir?” she said.
“So, you think we should skip the opening?” said Ada.
“Not a chance,” said Nina. “Your mom was right. I need to separate the artist from the artwork. Miroir may have been having a bad day, but I still love his work.”
Ada sighed.