[OpenLayers-Users] how to select and show a feature on page load?

[zach cruise]

basically auto select (by attribute) on page load (so that the popup
is already open):

i could fire a select event on load like here -
http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/119641/openlayers-programmatically-fire-modifyfeature-event
but can i even register that event?
http://dev.openlayers.org/docs/files/OpenLayers/Events-js.html
http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/42682/how-to-trigger-registered-events-in-openlayers

steve, if you are reading this, could you share how you did this -
http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/How-to-programmatically-open-close-Popup-td3931182.html

mapbox/leaflet makes this simpler but i want to keep my code in openlayers -
https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/example/v1.0.0/open-popup-externally/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18323105/programmatically-opening-a-popup-in-a-mapbox-map