Hello everyone, 

I haven't disappeared or given up on blogging here!
I'd like to share the story of why I've been gone so long with you, as well as 
explain what happened to the look of the site. 

Not long after I stopped using Google and Facebook,
I decided to stop trusting cloud providers to keep out of my stuff.
I started doing encrypted backups on everything on my computer.
I was also trying out KonMari, and working my way towards making a post about 
it.
At some point, while that was ongoing, I decided that I wasn't super happy with 
the distribution of linux I was running, and decided to change.
I double checked that I could pull info from my back ups,
then blew away my existing install. 

I forgot to check that I had a copy of my encryption key saved elseware.
A computer generated "random" key, was stored in a config file on my computer, 
and no where else.
I lost all of it.
I got lucky and I had an unencrypted back up stored elseware from about a year 
ago, but I lost a LOT of data.
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES, MAKE COPIES OF YOUR KEYS SOMEWHERE!
Amongst the things that were lost was the hugo theme I had developed to create 
the look of this site.
Luckily the content was all still where I have it hosted on tilde.town, but that 
was only the public directory that hugo creates, not what built it.

I decided that, since I was now clearly at a restart point, it would be a fun 
project to really build this one from scratch. I found a barebones theme called 
[Blank](https://themes.gohugo.io/theme/blank/) and have decided I'm going to 
build back up to something I find pretty from there.
I'm hosting the new theme on [codeburg]( https://codeberg.org/avalonw/avstheme)

I'm really enjoying playing with how hugo works and really getting to know
the nuts and bolts of it. Not to mention how much git learning I did to get the 
repo up for the new theme. I'm hoping to build something that's accessible, but 
I'll admit I don't know much about web accessability. I fully welcome any 
feedback about how I could improve the accessability and/or functionality of my 
site. 

As the entire blog is a hobby project for me, I'm not giving myself any firm 
timelines for updates and improvements on this, but I do intend to keep making 
updates, even if they're just small ones, and I'll be sure to post about it when 
I do. In the mean time, I'm hoping to start getting some content out again soon.  
(I lost what I'd written about KonMari, but I still want to share that adventure 
with y'all)

For those of you who are reading this sometime in the far future; here's a 
comparison of what my site used to look like, and what it looks like at the time 
of this post.

((note for those reading this on gopher, obviously I'm talking about the website, but I included the pics in question in this folder!))

Happy Halloween, more soon!