Family

RangerHQ Tuner 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 platforms because the audience for each is genuinely different.

Current family members

RangerHQ Tuner — this project

Surface: Chrome browser (toolbar + New Tab Page)
Function: Play SomaFM internet radio, log heard tracks, link out to Spotify / YouTube / Apple Music / Bandcamp
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-tuner
Distribution: LIVE on the Chrome Web Store since 2026-06-09

RangerHQ Radio — WordPress sibling

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: Same idea as Tuner but for WordPress admins — play SomaFM from your wp-admin sidebar with the same 4-button search-link affordance
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-radio
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (live)

RangerHQ Radio is the older sibling — it shipped first, and its inc/history.php is the file that Tuner's src/lib/history.js mirrors exactly. The 4-button search URLs (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Bandcamp) are the same URL templates in both.

RangerHQ Buddy — WordPress dashboard pet

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: A small virtual pet that lives in your WP dashboard. Mood will eventually reflect your site's health (post counts, outdated plugins, spam queue).
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-buddy
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (in review)

Unrelated to radio — different product, same family branding.

Coming next

RangerHQ Logbook

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

Browser ports

Edge: Manifest V3 / Chromium-based — RangerHQ Tuner should work as-is, just needs separate Microsoft Edge Add-ons store submission.
Firefox: Needs a web-ext adaptation — different background-script model. On the future roadmap.

Why a "family" of small things instead of one big thing

Each project has a sharp, single purpose and ships on the surface where it actually belongs. The RangerHQ Tuner UI lives in the browser because that's where people listen to music; the WordPress family lives in wp-admin because that's where the WordPress workflow lives.

Sharing a brand across surfaces — same helmet, same colour palette, same "hand-rolled, no-telemetry" promise — means a user who likes one is more likely to try another. Sharing code patterns across surfaces (the 4-button search URLs, the FIFO-history dedup rule, the Keep-a-Changelog format) means each new sibling ships faster than the last.

Identity

Logo: the RangerHQ helmet (src/assets/img/ranger.png)
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