If this site disappears

If you’re reading this page, maybe nothing is wrong yet and you’re only curious. Good. Read it anyway, so that you know where things are.

Websites don’t last. Domain names have to be paid for. Companies close. Someday letters.maglana.com will stop working, and I won’t be around to fix it. So I’m writing down every place these letters are kept and how to get them back. You don’t need to be a programmer. Nothing below asks you to install anything or to learn anything. If a step still feels hard, ask someone you trust to sit with you and work down the list together.

The letters exist in three places beyond this website. That might seem overkill but I would rather over-prepare than have you go looking for me one day and find nothing there.

1. The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a library that keeps copies of old web pages. Twice a day, copies of these pages were sent there automatically. Go to:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/letters.maglana.com

You will see a calendar. Days with a coloured circle are days a copy was saved. Click any circle, then click a time, and you will see the site as it looked on that day.

2. The repository itself

Everything you are looking at is also kept here:

https://github.com/relaxdiego/letters

That page looks like a wall of files, and it is. Don’t be put off. It holds these letters twice, in two different shapes, and either one is enough.

The whole website, in a folder. Click the green Code button, then Download ZIP. Unzip what you get, look for the file named index.html, and double-click it. The site opens in your browser, looking exactly as it looks now, running from your own computer. No internet. Nothing installed. The links carry you from letter to letter as usual — and if one of them ever opens a plain list of file names instead of a page, click the one named index.html in that list. That is the page. Put the folder somewhere safe — a backup drive, a second computer, a relative’s laptop — and the site can never really go away.

The letters as plain text. This website is a facade put in front of the letters to make them more presentable. The letters themselves are the plain .md files inside the content/letters/ folder. Each file name starts with the date, so they sort themselves in order. Click any one of them on GitHub, or open it in any text editor on any computer, and you will simply see the letter, with a title and a date at the top. No special program is needed, and none ever will be.

While you are there, the file PERMISSION.md is my written permission for the family to copy, print, and reprint these letters. A print shop may ask to see something like it. That is what it is for.

3. Paper

This step is the one I can’t promise you.

As I write this, no printed copy of these letters exists. I hope to make one. Perhaps by the time you read this I will have, and there is a book on a shelf somewhere in the family, so ask your mother, your brother, your cousins, your aunts, and uncles.

But maybe I never got around to it. If so, I’m sorry, you’ll have to do the thing I did not. Print these letters. Have them bound. Keep one, and give one to someone who does not live in your house. Paper needs no electricity, no password, and no company that still exists. It is the only link in this chain that does not depend on the world staying the way it is.

That is the whole chain. Two of those three places are real today, they are run by different people in different countries, and losing the letters would take both failing at once. The third is up to whoever reads this. It may be me. It may be you.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.

— Dad