Orthodox Prayers

An Orthodox prayer book for the browser. The pages are set like the printed books: black and red, drop caps, an ornament bar at the head of each page. The site works offline after the first visit, and it installs to a phone home screen as a standalone app.

Live at https://orthodoxprayers.net

Contents

• Morning Prayer of St. Philaret of Moscow
• Prayer at Daybreak of Elder Sophrony
• Short Prayers of the Hours for home use
• The Psalter, in twenty kathismata, with a pointer to the kathisma appointed for the current day of the month

Running it locally

The site is static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There is no build step and there are no dependencies. To work on it, serve the repository root over HTTP:

python3 -m http.server 8000

Then open http://localhost:8000/.

Serve the files over HTTP rather than opening them directly. The service worker and the web app manifest do not load from file:// URLs.

Layout

prayers.css holds the type, the color, and the two themes.

theme.js applies the stored theme before the first paint. It loads synchronously in the document head, so the page must never flash the wrong theme.

app.js handles theme cycling, drop-cap sizing, ornament rotation, and service worker registration.

sw.js caches the site for offline use. Raise VERSION after you change any cached file, or returning visitors keep the old copy.

vendor/pretext.js is the typesetting helper that sizes drop caps.

art/bars/ holds the ornament bars. The site picks one per day from the date.

_headers sets the Cloudflare Pages caching and security headers. The content security policy allows no inline script, so all JavaScript must live in an external file.

Deployment

Cloudflare Pages builds from main. There is no build command, and the output directory is the repository root.

If a change does not appear after a deploy, purge the changed paths at the edge. Cloudflare caches 404 responses for paths that did not exist before the deploy, and those cached misses outlive the deploy itself.

Texts and art

The Psalter of St Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Dallas, Texas (Orthodox Church in America); portions translated by +DMITRI, Archbishop of Dallas and the South. © 2004–2005 St Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral.

The ornament bars come from the Orthodox Illustration Project.

License

The code carries no license at this time. The texts and the art remain under the rights of their respective holders.