Second thing is google started off as a search engine that boosted sites based on how many links they had pointing back to them; google got so big that people set up "link farms" which were just spam websites that linked to legit sites (and eventually to other spam sites) and then google deranked links pages in like 2005. ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

Webrings let people interested in a site's topic browse through lots of other sites with the same topic to see what they had to say.

Obviously once you stumble into a webring you're going to spend a few hours happily browsing the ring, and that is NO GOOD FOR SEARCH ENGINES. They want you doing searches. So Yahoo bought Webring and killed it.

2. Webrings! These were great. For a while every site was part of a webring. Say you ran gerbilzone.com and wanted traffic from other gerbil sites, you'd join the Gerbil Enthusiast Webring, and paste some code into your HTML and you'd have a banner that pointed to gerbilmadness.com, and visitors from thegerbilsite.net would see a link to gerbilzone and you could traverse the sites in the whole gerbil webring until you'd seen them all and looped back around to the start (hence "ring").

How you used to get people looking at your website before "going viral" was a thing, in the Web 1.0 days when people surfed the information superhighway by clicking on links to go from site to site.

1. The "Links" page! Every site had a page that was just links to other websites that the site owner thought were cool. You could email other site owners whose sites you thought were cool and ask if they thought your site was cool too, and they'd link back to you.

@clacke Yup. Several in fact!

@clacke This is made by an arcade graphics company, I believe it was vectorized from a collection of differently-damaged sources.

There's some mechanical work to be done, but that can wait until next week. Here, have some pictures of the complete machine and its new control panel art. :)

Joystick shafts can be placed in a drill and spun against a rag with metal polish to shine them up a bit, like you see in these before-and-after pics.

I did the same to the rusty bolts holding the sticks in. I last polished the bolts about five or six years ago; this time I sprayed a couple coats of lacquer on them to try and keep them nice a bit longer.

Bonus: pic the owner took of joystick shaft before/after

Bonus: the owner helping with the initial scraping. Look how much the plastic lamination yellowed!

Bonus: pics the owner took of the panel after I'd marked all the gouges and then bondo'd them

@thegibson Well heck narrow it down a bit, this joint's full of sexy beasts

Well, less full now I've gone home, but the point stands

@thegibson Oh haha yeah I think I did a thread on that sometime last year, the hand used to make a noise like a tractor when it moved :P

USUALLY straightforward. I forgot to mention the importance of checking the slot for debris before you start hammering the T-molding in!

All in now anyway, I'm going to reattach the panel to its piano hinge next.

@ieure Nah, not on this one. I've used it in the past but now that new reproductions are tougher I don't bother. It tends to trap filth. :)

Here we go, all trimmed now. Picture shows the same control panel but with the excess trimmed off and joystick/button holes cut. You don't have to be particularly precise cutting the control holes as the joystick's dust cap and the buttons' collars will cover the edges of the cut.

Now I'm wondering whether to do the T-Molding or the controls next. Here's a picture of the new T-molding, which covers and protects the edges of the panel. It's called T-molding because it's shaped like a T, with a prong in the middle that pushes into a slot cut into the edge of the wood. You just hammer it in gently, unless you bought the cheap stuff, in which case you glue it in. :)

I decided to do the T-molding next, because it's easy and I still have a stress headache from the laying down of the artwork. Transitions around corners like the one shown in the picture can be tricky, but it's usually a pretty straightforward and very satisfying job.

Here I've finally got all the art removed. But there's still the SMELLY GLUE to deal with, and it has an unpleasantly organic note that reminds me very much of several-day-unwashed male crotch.

It took, no kidding, several hours of scraping to get to this point. The remnants of the original art are visible here beneath the remains of the Grey.

Notice that the Grey is actually grey here, not cigarette tar brown, because we've scraped and broken away the top lamination of plastic.