Family

Ranger Reader is the simplest sibling in the RangerHQ family. It is the proof that the family ethos — lightweight, no telemetry, hand-rolled, GPL v2+, ship for self first — works at every scale, from one HTML file all the way up to a Manifest V3 Chrome extension.

Current family members

Ranger Reader — this project

Surface: Any web browser (works offline from file://)
Function: RSVP speed reading with ORP anchor — Word / Sentence / Paragraph modes
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-reader
Format: ONE HTML FILE. Open it. That's the install.
Distribution: Self-hosted; copies exist on davidtkeane.com and the Gitea repo
Why it's the simplest sibling: It has no plugin host, no store, no marketplace, no service-worker, no offscreen-document complexity. Open ranger-reader.html → it works. The entire codebase is one file you can read in an editor in 10 minutes.

RangerHQ Radio — WordPress sibling

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: SomaFM player with track history + favourites + four-button search to Spotify / YouTube / Apple / Bandcamp
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-radio
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (LIVE)

RangerHQ Buddy — WordPress sibling

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: A small virtual pet for every WP admin user; Phase E will tie 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 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, four-button search to the big-four music 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 project 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
✅ Tier-1 admin discipline — single h1 per admin page (where applicable), escaped output everywhere, accessibility-respecting
✅ Keep-a-Changelog format — every release documented at the file-level detail

Ranger Reader takes these promises to the limit. It is one file. It has zero dependencies. It contacts zero servers. It works offline forever. There is no clearer expression of the "hand-rolled and self-contained" ethos than a single HTML file that does one job well.

Identity

Logo (family): the RangerHQ helmet (the gladiator / Spartan-style silhouette)
Palette (family): dark base #0f1411, accent green #6dbf7a (RangerHQ green), cream #f4e9b7 (highlights)
Palette (Reader): dark teal #0e1a23, accent blue #2271b1, ORP red #ff5252 — Reader pre-dates the family palette unification and keeps its own colours because dark teal is easier on the eyes for hours of reading
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

Why Reader is the "scale floor" of the family

The other RangerHQ projects ship as plugins or extensions for the platforms they live in:

Radio + Buddy + Logbook need WordPress
Tuner needs Chrome (or Chromium-based browsers)

Reader needs a browser. That's it. No specific browser, no specific version, no internet connection, no account, no host, no maintenance. It is the project that survives the longest if everything else goes away — if you have a copy of ranger-reader.html on a USB stick in 2046, you can still use it.

That is what "lightweight, hand-rolled, no-cloud" means at its purest. Every other family member is held to the same standards within their own platform constraints.