2021.08.24

Important Announcement:

Classic Sites Discontinued

Future of this Site

On September 1st of 2021 Classic Sites will no longer be publicly viewable. That means that this website in its current form will basically disappear from the internet overnight. Over the last few months I have been in the process of archiving my site so that everything it once was will not be lost and theoretically could be restored at some future date. I am likely to complete my archival over the course of the next few days.

So what does this mean for the future of this site? Will One To Infinity cease to exist on the internet starting September 1st? In it's current form, yes, but it will survive in an alternative form after this date. Allow me to explain. Google is offering a way for owners of classic google sites to continue to host their websites on the internet, but there are some serious caveats. I have tested their "transfer" process. It preserves all webpages and all plain text. In principle all the url's should be preserved and unchanged, meaning it will not cause hyperlinking issues offsite. Superficially the website will still be accessible and links will still work, but the website itself will be severely hobbled by the transfer. Firstly all webpages will be defaulted to black text on a plain white background. Any images files will either be lost and/or their links broken (meaning you won't see any images on any of the webpages). Last, and perhaps worst of all, it is possible that all internal hyperlinks will be completely broken by the transfer process. In other words, while technically every public page will still be accessible, pragmatically speaking the site will be a hollow shell of it's former self. One small saving grace is that an alternative tree navigation will be provided by google sites, so it will still be possible to get around, but you won't be able to do it through the links provided in the webpages themselves.

At least the site will continue to be available, in some form, but what about after the transfer is complete? What are my plans after that? Well I will have to explore whatever available options there are for personalizing the site using the new interface, and there is no guarantee what that might look like. The process of restoring all images and links would be a tedious, time consuming, and arduous process, amounting to possible months wasted trying to fix the damage caused by the transfer.

So is that it? Is The Large Number Site, after 13 years of growing up with the googology community, doomed to just float in cyberspace until it finally deteriorates to nothingness? Have I thrown in the towel and will I abandon the Site? No. Not at all. This website never really achieved my original vision for it. There is a reason it is billed as a "perpetual work-in-progress". In fact, ironically despite all this time I never actually got around to discussing the work for which this website was created in the first place, the work that precipitated the creation of this site by about 1 year. And also despite all this time there are still many common topics, like Conway Chain Arrows, the TREE function, Busy Beavers, etc. that I never got around to discussing. There are many articles I began working on but never finished. There were even whole Chapters planned that never got released. Actually I was hoping to release a new Chapter soon (part of Section IV) but I decided to postpone it until after assessing the damage caused by the transfer. If the Site is still reasonably functional I may proceed with the Chapter anyway, otherwise I may have to spend some time properly restoring the site before working on the Chapter. I will try and make another announcement when I've decided what to do next.

September 1st will be the end of this site as you've come to know it, but hopefully it won't be the end of the site entirely. Stay tuned, and keep counting...

Sincerely,

Sbiis Saibian