I have a friend who has JavaScript turned off, but he wants to read Scripting News and would prefer to not have to turn it on just to read this site. He is a friend, and it was easy to do, so I set it up so the site will work without JS turned on.

But here's the thing, that means that if you have it turned on, you'll see a flash of the Blog panel, if you have one of the other tabs pre-selected. We remember your panel and it's the same next time you visit. Some people come for the river or the links. I want to accommodate them too, and as a esthetic matter it really bothers me that there's this flash.

I bet this is confusing, so I recorded a short video demo.

So this is a case where people who have JS turned on experience something kind of ugly for the benefit of people who have it turned off.

So the question is this -- is there a way to specify that code be run before anything is displayed?

BTW, my guess is that this is not possible, so I have a Plan B in mind. ;-)