Monkey Business

Created 2026-05-22, last modified 2026-06-09. Visibility: public

Today, I needed a break from solving hard API problems in C, as I've been working hard on the mk.h header lately (I'll recap that all when it's done, but I do post progress stuff on the Fediverse). So I've worked on my website to fix how it looks, as well as is possible!

The main page body is centered, over a reasonable flat color (since gradients aren't supported), and disables the Glu panel for noscript browsers. I also have syntax highlighting working with Pygments now! That means it works on lite browsers, but it also supports additional languages like x86-64 assembly syntax!

It turns out this feature exists out of the box in the Python Markdown package. As usual, I have frustrations with the architectural decisions in that package, and supporting Prone as a highlighted language will probably require forking Pygments and using my own copy. But at least in the short term, for a mainstream use case, this was basically "flip a switch" levels of effort.

The Charlotteworld webring embed will never render correctly or work without JS, so this also hides when scripts are disabled. I achieved this with code sharing with the Glu panel by:

Adding a noscript class to the body tag.
Adding a requires-js class to things that need to be hidden when JS is turned off.
A little CSS for the hiding: body.noscript .requires-js { display: none; }
A line of JS that removes the noscript class from body on page load.

This means that in a full-featured browser, we remove the noscript class and make those other elements visible pretty immediately. On a lite browser like Dillo, anything marked requires-js stays hidden, because we never un-hide it.

Additionally, the footnotes section has some proper breathing room, the Progressive Enhancement badge renders text correctly (haven't figured out Mastodon logo yet), and there's one more cool feature.

Music make you lose control

I really didn't like the state of my music page, which basically just linked to proprietary third-party websites that have started paywalling the work I did, which I've long since committed to providing to the world for free. I would like, long-term, for my own website to be consistently and durably the best place to listen to my music for $0.

Getting old school with tables for alignment made sense here. I've set up the infrastructure for my website code repo to copy the correct files (and rename them) over from my Obsidian vault, rather than contain copies of large media asset files in git.

We have good syntax highlighting now, so I don't feel shy about pasting the code that does the work. It's literally as simple as this.

def generate_album(name_short: str, name_long: str, files: dict):
    src = SRC / "Attachments" / "Music" / "Campadrenalin" / name_long
    dst = DST / "static" / "music" / name_short
    dst.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
    for new, old in files.items():
        copy(src / old, dst / new)

def generate_static():
    DST.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
    copytree(STATIC, DST / "static", dirs_exist_ok=True)
    with open(DST / "static" / "highlight.css", "w") as f:
        f.write(HtmlFormatter().get_style_defs('.codehilite'))

    # Music
    generate_album("llnm", "LLNM demo 1", {
        "cover.jpg": "906972_28343.jpg",
        "01-summer-dream.mp3": "01 Summer Dream.mp3",
        "02-another-day.mp3": "02 AnotherDay.mp3",
        "03-chemical-tension.mp3": "03 ChemicalTension.mp3",
        "04-downright-chipper.mp3": "04 Downright Chipper.mp3",
        "05-ambulant.mp3": "05 Ambulant.mp3",
        "06-test-flight.mp3": "06 TestFlightv.2.mp3",
        "07-phoenix.mp3": "07 Pheonix.mp3",
        "08-sand.mp3": "08 Sand.mp3",
        "09-burn-with-me.mp3": "09 BurnWithMe.mp3",
        "10-nuclear-winter.mp3": "10 NuclearWinter.mp3",
        "11-iceberg-in-the-sky.mp3": "11 Iceberg in the Sky.mp3",
        "12-solitude.mp3": "12 Solitude.mp3",
        "13-the-beat-of-the-moon.mp3": "13 The Beat of the Moon.mp3",
        "14-platform-descending.ogg": "platform_descending.ogg",
        "15-red-spot.mp3": "15 RedSpot0.mp3",
        "16-steam-machine.mp3": "16 SteamMachine0.mp3",
        "17-floppy-jalopy.mp3": "17 FloppyJalopy0.mp3",
        "18-solipsis.ogg": "Solipsis.ogg",
    })
    # TODO: flesh out with other songs, track order
    generate_album("fitgp", "Forward is the Great Password", {
        "snow-at-the-lodge.mp3": "Snow at the Lodge.mp3",
    })

The music page is not autogenerated, and a lot of my old albums don't have any canonical record of track order (requiring me to be my own archaeologist), so my goal is to publish an album a week every Monday. That lets me pace out all the "checking I embedded the right URLs" and such work, so I'm not doing burnout amounts of it in a sitting. The pacing is also probably better for my online audience.

On a browser like Firefox, HTML5 audio controls work as you'd expect.

I feel like, for a brain-foggy day, I still managed to get a lot of stuff done that was personally important to me. We'll see about more work on Prone tomorrow.

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