A Quiet Week at Nordic Forest Echoes

It has been a quiet week at Nordic Forest Echoes.

There have been a few small changes behind the scenes, but nothing particularly visible for visitors and no new photographs, recordings or videos to point at this time.

Most of my attention has gone somewhere else.

This week I built and launched HardHQ, a new home for my more technical and personal projects. I had reached the point where websites, scripts and various small projects were scattered across too many places, so it made sense to gather them somewhere of their own.

HardHQ now brings together the websites I run for one reason or another, along with the scripts and tools I publish on GitHub.

That also gave me a good excuse to revisit the scripts themselves.

I went through the existing repositories, cleaned things up, improved documentation, tightened some of the code and spent time making the GitHub repositories — and my GitHub profile — look a little less like something that had simply accumulated over the years.

Launching a website is also rarely just a matter of putting some pages online.

There has been Cloudflare configuration to deal with: WAF rules, caching and the usual collection of settings that only become interesting when they are wrong.

Then came Ahrefs tracking and the inevitable list of things that appears afterwards: SEO details, broken links, oversized images and other small problems that apparently had been patiently waiting for someone to look for them.

Google Search Console and Bing also needed their properties configured.

After that came another round of checks: CSP and HTTP headers, SecurityHeaders, SSL Labs, Google Workspace and Gmail, followed by SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

And then the internal and external security checks.

And then the small fixes caused by the checks.

And then the checks caused by the small fixes.

So while Nordic Forest Echoes has looked unusually quiet this week, things have not exactly been standing still.

In a way, this kind of work is part of the same project too. Nordic Forest Echoes has gradually become more than a collection of photographs and field recordings. There is quite a bit of infrastructure underneath it, and much of what I learn while building other things eventually finds its way back here.

For now, though, there is nothing dramatic to announce.

The forest is still there.

I have simply spent the week configuring DNS records instead.