Family

RangerHQ Buddy is one of several RangerHQ projects by David Keane. The family share a name, a visual identity (the helmet logo), a GPL v2+ licence, and a "lightweight, no-telemetry, hand-rolled" ethos. They live on different surfaces because the audiences are genuinely different.

Current family members

RangerHQ Buddy — this project

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: A small virtual pet for every WP admin user, with Phase E (the headline feature) tying its mood to your site's actual health
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-buddy
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (in round-2 review at time of writing)

RangerHQ Radio — WordPress sibling

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: Plays SomaFM internet radio from your wp-admin sidebar, with the 4-button search-link affordance (Spotify / YouTube / Apple / Bandcamp) on every track
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-radio
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (LIVE)

RangerHQ Radio's inc/history.php was the file that the Tuner Chrome extension's src/lib/history.js mirrored. The 4-button search URL templates (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Bandcamp) are byte-for-byte identical across both.

RangerHQ Tuner — Chrome sibling

Surface: Chrome browser (toolbar popup + optional New Tab Page override)
Function: Same idea as Radio, but in the browser instead of wp-admin. Plays SomaFM, logs tracks, 4-button search out to the major services
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-tuner
Distribution: LIVE on the Chrome Web Store since 2026-06-09

Coming next

RangerHQ Logbook

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: Site-changes audit log for WordPress administrators. Captures who did what when across plugins, themes, options, users — searchable + exportable
Status: In design

Family-wide promises (the "RangerHQ promise")

Every plugin or extension in the RangerHQ family commits to:

✅ GPL v2 or later — open source, audit-able, fork-able
✅ No telemetry, ever — nothing leaves your site / browser / device
✅ No third-party JavaScript SDKs — the code you install is the code that runs
✅ No CDN-fetched fonts or images — assets are bundled, period
✅ Narrow permissions — request only what's needed, justify the rest
✅ Per-user / per-device privacy — no cross-account leakage, no shared site-wide state where per-user makes more sense
✅ Hand-rolled, no build step where possible — vanilla PHP on WordPress, vanilla JS in the browser, ESM where applicable
✅ Tier-1 admin discipline — single h1 per admin page, escaped output everywhere, accessibility-respecting, no inline <style> blocks
✅ Keep-a-Changelog format — every release documented at the file-level detail

If a plugin or extension can't meet all of these, it doesn't ship under the RangerHQ name.

Identity

Logo: the RangerHQ helmet (the gladiator/Spartan-style silhouette)
Palette: dark base #0f1411, accent green #6dbf7a (RangerHQ green), cream #f4e9b7 (highlights)
Typography: system fonts, no web fonts
Voice: matter-of-fact, "what it does today" + "what it doesn't do yet"
Maker: David Keane, Dublin, Ireland