If this site disappears

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

Websites do not last. Domain names have to be paid for. Companies close. Someday letters.maglana.com will stop answering, and I will not be around to fix it. So I am writing down, plainly, every place these letters are kept and how to get them back. You do not need to be a programmer. If any of this feels difficult, hand this page to a capable AI assistant and ask it to walk you through the step you are stuck on.

The letters exist in five places. Work down the list until one of them works.

1. The backup web addresses

Try these two, in order:

https://relaxdiego.com/letters

https://relaxdiego.github.io/letters

These are the same website, served by GitHub under my other names instead of letters.maglana.com. Often, when one address dies, another is still alive.

2. If the backup addresses send you somewhere dead

Each of these addresses is really a signpost pointing at the next one. Today the chain runs like this:

relaxdiego.github.io/letters  →  relaxdiego.com/letters  →  letters.maglana.com

If a name near the end of that chain has died, the signposts before it will still point at it, and you will land on nothing. The fix is to take the dead signposts down. Each one is a setting on GitHub, not a file — you cannot fix this by deleting anything from the repository.

You will need to be signed in to GitHub as me, or as someone I have given access. Then:

Go to https://github.com/relaxdiego/letters. Click Settings, then Pages in the left sidebar. Under Custom domain, clear the box and save. This stops the site pointing at letters.maglana.com.
If relaxdiego.com is also dead, do the same again on a different repository: https://github.com/relaxdiego/relaxdiego.github.io. Settings, then Pages, then clear Custom domain and save. This stops everything pointing at relaxdiego.com.

That second step surprises people, so I will say it plainly: the redirect to relaxdiego.com is controlled by that other repository, not by this one. Clearing it here is not enough.

Wait a few minutes, then try https://relaxdiego.github.io/letters again. With both custom domains cleared, GitHub serves the letters at that address directly, and no expired domain name can get in the way.

3. The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a library that keeps copies of old web pages. Every time I published a letter, a copy was 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. Click through the letters and read them there. The copies are real pages, not summaries.

4. The repository itself

Everything lives at:

https://github.com/relaxdiego/letters

The website is only a coat of paint. The letters themselves are the plain .md files inside the content/letters/ folder. Click any one of them. You will see the letter, in ordinary words, with a title and a date at the top. No special program is needed to read them — they are just text. You can download the whole thing at once with the green Code button, then Download ZIP, and keep it somewhere safe.

If you want the website back, or a book, hand the whole repository to a capable AI assistant and ask it plainly. Something like:

This repository contains letters from my father. Please turn them into a print-ready PDF book, ordered by date.

Or:

Please rebuild the website from this repository so I can read it on my own computer.

The file AGENTS.md in the repository tells that assistant everything it needs to know. It is written for exactly this moment.

5. Paper

This step is the one I cannot 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. It costs you nothing to ask.

But perhaps I never got around to it. If so, I am sorry, and I would ask you 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, because houses burn down. 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. Four of those five places are real today, they are run by different people in different countries, and losing the letters would take all four failing at once.

The fifth is up to whoever reads this. It may be me. It may be you.

I would rather over-prepare than have you go looking for me one day and find nothing there.

— Dad