Revision Notes

A short history of this site. The pre-2026 entries are summaries; the original revision log was a chronological list of contributor submissions, most of which have been retired along with the submissions program itself.

2026 (mid-year) — Player and social refinements

The Jukebox grew a pinned "now playing" dock at the bottom of the page during Play all covers — you no longer have to scroll back up to skip to the next song. The dock carries the current title, prev / stop / next, and a Jump to selector for warping to any song in the catalog.
Prev / next on the Jukebox skip by song, not by individual cover — so songs with multiple covers ("Antilullaby", "Listen to Chief Seattle", "My God Says") don't trap the playlist.
Each Jukebox row now exposes its lyrics, sheet music, and MIDI directly — no need to open the dedicated song page just to read along or download the score.
Lyrics open in a new in-page dialog with language tabs for the songs that have French and Dutch translations ("The Greatest Gift", "Here", "My God Says").
Open Graph and Twitter social cards added across the site — pasting a link to any song into Slack, Bluesky, Discord, or messaging apps now produces a preview with the song's cover art, title, and subtitle. Other pages use a site-wide cover illustration.
Canonical URLs and per-page descriptions added for search engines.
This page (release notes) is now linked from the footer of every page.

2026 — Site refresh

Site rebuilt as a static site. Headers and footers are now centralized; pages are generated from a content manifest by a PHP build script.
Stable legacy URLs preserved for every kept work — song HTML pages, lyric pages, MIDI files, and PDFs all live at the same paths as before.
MIDI files rendered to MP3 so the music plays directly in the browser. Each song page has an in-page audio player with track-level deep links and a PDF preview modal.
AI-generated vocal covers added for most songs (Suno / AI Song Maker), clearly labeled as covers.
New song: Not a Vegetable.
Outside submissions and the discussion forum retired. The site is now a personal showcase.
Visual redesign in a folk-chapbook idiom — pale-green paper background, forest-green accent, hand-set serif headings, generous typography.
The "Why Animal Rights?" essay and the McDougall nutrition factsheet are preserved as historical content with editorial banners — the McDougall page in particular contains 1990s-era B12 and calcium guidance that's been superseded.
The 1990s "Selected Links" page has been retired (most of the links pointed to defunct directories like Yahoo and GeoCities).
Internal links to retired pages inside the legacy essays have been unwrapped to plain text rather than left as dead clicks.

2006 and earlier — original site

From 1995 to roughly 2006, this site collected songs, stories, poems, and commentary from many contributors in addition to the original works of Mohan Embar. It went through several technical eras (raw HTML, Microsoft FrontPage, JSPs on EnviroLink) and accumulated revision notes for each new submission. Selected milestones from that period:

1995 — site founded.
1997 — Listen to Chief Seattle added.
Jan 1998 — moved to EnviroLink under the Animal Rights Counterculture banner; new domain animalsong.org.
Dec 1998 — added Antilullaby, Farmer Boy, Here; full-length MIDIs for all songs.
1997–2006 — many contributor poems and stories added (now retired).