Pika Release Notes

We’re proud and quite fond of the default hypertext-focused design language of Pika blogs, but sometimes an icon just feels right (and it may help your readers). Now you can opt to use an icon instead of text when adding an external link to your navigation:

You can see what this looks like in the navigation of this very blog. 👆

The initial list of supported icons for this was built from the links Pika peeps are already linking to: social media like Mastodon and Bluesky, portfolio websites for photography and video, and a select few others options that make sense.

Additionally, we’ve made the “Add link” option easier to find (it was a bit tucked away before) and you’ll also see a search icon if you add your Site Search page to your navigation.

Original source

Hot on the heels of our site-wide Custom Code announcement, we’re excited to share that Pika now offers Pika Pro subscribers the ability to add custom code directly into your individual posts and pages.

Custom HTML

Custom HTML is a new, flexible block type for Pika’s editor (you can find it in the ••• “More” menu). It offers the ability to inject custom handwritten HTML blocks within the text of your posts and pages, but it’s especially useful for embedding content for services where Pika doesn’t already support automatic embedding.

As an example, Flickr is not in our list of supported automatic embed services, but here’s a Flickr embed in a Pika post:

Here is what that looks like in Pika’s editor:

Here’s another one, for fun:

We’re excited to see what embeds or hand-rolled HTML you’ll add to your Pika posts! Now on to some FAQs, which are almost identical to our Custom Code announcement…

How does my custom HTML code render in places other than my site?

The custom HTML code you add to your posts is also passed to your newsletter and RSS feeds, but those services may sanitize things like script, form, and even iframe tags. (In fact, if you’re reading this over email, you’ll probably notice some stuff missing above — that’s your email client!)

We also perform similar sanitization for those same tags on The Pika Pulse, where your post appears alongside other Pika peeps.

Why can’t I use this new editor option on the free Pika Pup plan?

The internet can be terrible. We do not want to offer the means for nefarious people to misuse the Pika platform. If you want to try out our custom code features by upgrading to the Pika Pro plan, rest assured we’re happy to provide a full refund if you decide Pika isn’t for you.

Also if your subscription lapses, the custom HTML you’ve already added keeps working, but you cannot add or edit a block until you subscribe again.

How do I avoid breaking my site with custom HTML code?

We can’t prevent custom code from breaking your site, so we recommend adding only one thing at a time. If the most recent custom code that you added breaks your site, go delete it. We recommended reading our Custom Code manual for a full disclaimer and some guidance to custom code in Pika.

Original source

It’s August and summer is waning. Yet our commitment to constantly improving Pika is always on the rise! We’re betting you’ve noticed a lot of these changes as a few things in your dashboard have moved around. As always, there’s a mix of visible changes and quiet maintenance work that helps keep Pika simple, flexible, and pleasant to use.

Writing posts and pages

• Improved the experience of canceling with unsaved changes in the editor
• Moved post/page Settings into a sidebar on desktop viewports
• Rearranged the editor toolbar a bit (i.e. moved Undo/Redo to the right)
• Added a “Clear formatting” option to the editor toolbar’s ••• More menu
• Updated image toolbar buttons to match other Pika toolbar buttons
• Updated our automatic embed support to include pasting in embed iframe code (for supported services)
• Searching when creating a link now finds tag pages, and you can use prefixes like post: page: and tag: to narrow down your search
• Made the Drafts list in the Dashboard collapsible

Viewing your site

• When possible the “Back to all posts” link will now bring your readers back to whichever list of posts they originally clicked into to get to your post (e.g. your homepage, a tag page, etc)
• When using the default home page, adding your Blog page to your navigation will link to your home page, not /posts
• Updated heading anchor link icons to hashtags (#)
• Added a “Copy code to clipboard” option to all code blocks
• Added 3 new Guestbook settings:
  • Choose whether a new signing defaults to drawing or message
  • Turn off emails for new signings
  • Temporarily pause all new guestbook signings
• Added site-nav-link and site-nav-link--active classes to navigation items to enable more custom CSS styling
• Added ISO YYYY-MM-DD as a date format option
• Added leading zeroes to the date formats with date before the month

Misc & Maintenance

• Added 5 new font themes: Atkinson Hyperlegible, Courier, Inter, Lora, and Verdana (also Pika’s Dashboard font on Windows is now Inter)
• Added 1 new color theme: Lavender
• Updated the color theme picker to save vertical space
• Added :hover styles to buttons around Pika
• Improved Micropub handling of embeddable links
• Fixed some bugs in how Pika saves your work in the browser when writing
• Fixed a bug where self-hosted video/audio sometimes wasn’t playable
• Fixed a bug when pasting direct audio/video file links
• Created a write.as import script
• Updated many code libraries for security enhancements

Original source

Pika has offered the option for custom CSS since the beginning. Many of you who are a bit more technically inclined have been asking us to support custom scripts and other code on your site. If you’re a Pika Pro, we’re happy to announce that you can now add custom code via Settings > Code. (Note that you’ll now also find custom CSS under Settings > Code instead of Settings > Theme.)

What might you use this for? We’ve written up a couple of example scripts that you can add to your site here. (Yes, Claude helped a bit writing these.) Many customers have wanted to add third-party code like custom analytics, webrings, or extra tags to the of their site. We caution you, though, to make sure you greatly trust any third-party whose code you are copying, and be especially careful when linking directly to third-party code.

On to some FAQs…

Why isn’t my post preview including my custom code?

While post previews include custom CSS, custom code added to the or will not be included. This is a security measure because blog post previews are served from the pika.page domain rather than your site’s domain. It would not be safe to let arbitrary JavaScript run on pika.page.

Is custom code just about running JavaScript on my site?

No! You can also add HTML to your , and then manipulate it with JavaScript. Another example would be using a tag in your section to include a font instead of using @import in your custom CSS (more info here).

Why can’t I use these new custom code options on the free Pika Pup plan?

The internet can be terrible. We do not want to offer the means for nefarious people to misuse the Pika platform. If you want to try out these custom code features by upgrading to the Pika Pro plan, rest assured we’re happy to provide a full refund if you decide Pika isn’t for you.

How do I avoid breaking my site with custom code?

We can’t prevent custom code from breaking your site, so we recommend adding only one thing at a time. If the most recent custom code that you added breaks your site, go delete it.

Original source

Tables are finally available in Pika! Yes, tables.

Sometimes information is best conveyed by a good ol’ fashioned table. For example, here are the top names in Nationwide’s nationwide Wackiest Pet Name voting campaign:

🏅 Pet Name Pet Type Hometown Top Dog “Internet Browser” Plott Hound San Antonio, Texas Top Cat “Cheddar Big Booty Cheeseburger” Domestic Longhair Benton, Arkansas Top Exotic “Space Cowboy” Bearded Dragon Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina

You might notice this table is wider than the rest of this post. Depending on the content and number of columns, some tables need a bit extra breathing room, so we built that in as an option.

You can find the “Table” option in the editor’s ••• toolbar menu. Copy→pasting a table should work well too. We’re looking forward to all the fun data and information we’ll get to see in The Pika Pulse!

Original source

Pika offers a variety of special Pika Variables you can insert into your posts and pages that help you do things like output a list of your posts, create a table of contents, add a newsletter, search, or contact form, and more. Many of them also support optional parameters, which make them even more powerful.

While they’re a bit of an advanced feature, that’s no reason to make them hard to discover. Starting today, you’ll find a new “Insert variable” option in the editor toolbar, under the ••• “More” menu:

Original source

It’s time: The Pika Pulse is live again!

The Pika Pulse is our take on helping you discover personal bloggers that are writing on Pika. It now includes a new Following feed and other experimental ideas. Let’s dive into the details…

Recent

Recent is basically the old Pulse: a general feed of recent posts written on Pika. It’s intended to be a fun and serendipitous way to find new blogs and posts to read on Pika. How it’s built includes some intentional design decisions and experiments this time around:

• First and foremost, the Recent feed is not intended to be a comprehensive feed of all content on Pika. As we mentioned in our Coming Soon post, only blogs that opt into sharing on Pulse (under Settings > Site visibility) and are manually approved by us will show up here. This Pulse-approval process is new for our small team, and we’re intentionally taking it slow in approving blogs as we learn and discover what the Pulse vibes should be! See our updated Pika Rules for more info.
• Additionally, with only 25 posts displayed, only one post from a given blog can ever be on the Recent feed at any one time. Pika will always display the blog’s oldest available post.
• We also believe that discovery doesn’t need to be up-to-the-minute. Blogging isn’t a reactive activity, but a contemplative one. Therefore, we’re experimenting with the Recent feed including a large delay. New posts from Pulse-approved blogs won't show up in this feed for about 24 hours after their publish date.
• Lastly, if there’s a particular blogger you’d rather not see in Pulse, you can mute them from this feed via the ••• menu on the post (if you have a free Pika account). Over time this helps you tailor Recent to your own tastes and interests.

What this all boils down to: Once you discover a new Pika blogger on Recent, if you don’t want to miss a post from them, subscribe via RSS or follow them on Pulse.

Following

Following works quite differently from Recent. This feed includes all posts from all the blogs you follow on Pulse, with only a short 5 minute delay after publish time. (This is the same delay Pika adds to RSS feeds, which gives authors time to make quick post-publish edits.) You can only follow blogs on Pulse if you have a free Pika account.

We think Following on Pulse is a fun and unique alternative to RSS, where you can see all the updates to your favorite Pika blogs in one stream, displayed with the visual character the blogger intended. Posts here have no read or unread state, so you can feel free to check in at your own pace.

For Pika bloggers, like with RSS, there’s no data on who or how many people are following you in this way.

Moderating

Again, as mentioned previously, we, Good Enough, are a small team of two people. While we now have the approval process along with internal mechanisms to help us catch spam, inappropriate content, and other rules violations before they become a problem or land on Pulse, it’s inevitable that we will miss something — we can’t personally vet every post.

We welcome reports from readers if you see a post that might not align with Pika’s values or rules. If you’re logged in, you can report a post from its ••• menu anywhere in Pulse.

That said, if Pika is successful in welcoming a diverse range of people and viewpoints, there will likely be bloggers and content on Pika with which you disagree. In these cases we suggest blogging to share your own insight, respectfully. You can also always mute blogs from your Recent feed.

What will you discover?

This day has been a long time coming, and we’re excited to have The Pika Pulse back online! It’s full of fun little experiments, including “Translate with Google”, keyboard shortcuts to jump between posts, a random-blog button at the bottom of the page, and more.

Once again, we are treating this next iteration like an experiment — one we might need to tweak over time, possibly overhaul, or pivot, or if need be again, end. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on Pulse, the new ideas we’re trying out, and/or anything else you wish to share.

Now go forth and discover!

Original source

Pika’s latest round of updates includes a familiar mix: writing improvements, better support for custom sites, more translations, and plenty of under-the-hood work to keep everything running smoothly. Maybe one of the items below will fix a nagging issue for you?

We’re always improving over here at Pika. Kaizen!

Writing posts and pages

• Typing in a symbol (e.g. ©) now gives you that symbol as text instead of emoji, which you can still get from the emoji picker (e.g. ©)
• Added support for Transister.fm podcast embeds (use the share link)
• Added keyboard support to navigation item reordering
• Updated Micropub API so it can process incoming image captions in the same format that is seen in the image caption output from the Micropub API
• Fixed issue with Micropub API posts not properly building footnotes
• Updated iA Writer integration to consider the first heading in a post as Pika’s title, rather than using the filename
• Added self-service support for self-hosted Umami analytics
• Fixed bug where select all did not work in the editor when footnotes existed

Viewing your site

• Added Greek, Indonesian, and Esperanto translations
• Included Custom CSS with newsletter emails, so your styles come through in your emails
• Added tag classes (e.g. .site-post-tag-[id]) alongside .site-post classes in the DOM to help with Custom CSS targeting
• Fixed issue with previous/next footers for posts published at the same exact time
• Fixed issue with page slug generation for posts using only characters sets (Hangul, Chinese, etc) that are not currently URL-compatible
• Improved slug creation for full width characters and unique characters like ‘&’, ‘%’, ‘+’, and ‘@’
• Improved search when searching quote characters

Misc & Maintenance

• Updated our Rules to touch on NSFW and questionable content
• Fixed bug with aliases that included trailing slashes
• Fixed a bug with custom domains when someone misses a payment and then resume Pro status
• Limited the max size of custom CSS to guard against shenanigans
• Hardened custom CSS from a couple newly-discovered hacking vectors
• Created a weblog.lol, Hugo, Astro, and Micro.blog BAR import scripts
• Update to the latest Ruby and Rails versions
• Updated many code libraries for security enhancements
• Added a number of caching headers to our responses to improve page load speed across Pika

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”
– Phil Karlton

😭

Original source

Pika has supported writing your blog in a non-English language for nearly a year. For many languages, Pika has also been able to provide translations for the language across your site. One missing link, though, is for folks who blog in more than one language, and we’re happy today to announce that we’ve closed that gap.

To change the language on an individual post or page, simply visit the post’s Settings and select the new language via Set language.

Your site will continue to be translated in the primary language you set for your blog, but individual pages and posts will have the following changes:

• The tag for the page will include a lang attribute with your chosen language (and locale if necessary) for the page
• Your RSS feeds will still indicate your site language globally, but each individual post will indicate the post language if it differs from your site language
• The open graph tags on the page will also indicate your chosen language and locale for the page

We hope this goes a long way to better supporting those of you who blog in multiple languages!

Original source

Over the years, many who blog tend to move their site around to different hosts, or change their domain names. A big pain in this process is when their internal links are pointing to full URLs that may include old domain names.

For example, before today if we wanted to link to our guestbook we would need to enter the URL https://pika.pika.page/guestbook in the editor’s link dialog. If we decided move our blog to https://pikablog.page in the future, we’d have to remember to update that link as well.

If instead we could have linked the word guestbook to /guestbook, a domain-relative URL, that guestbook link would Just Work™ after our domain change.

The good news is that Pika now supports relative links!

And whenever you add a new link via the handy link search, you will get a relative link automatically:

If you generate an export, it will relative links as well, so if you move to a new service your internal links should continue to work well at your new home.

This was a pretty big change, reaching into all sorts of areas of Pika, so do let us know if you see anything amiss. Oh, and also sign our guestbook!

Note: Any links that you’ve created on existing posts and pages are not automatically updated to be relative. You will need to update these links manually if you’d like them to be relative links.

Original source

A while back a customer asked if the Pika variable to list out blogs posts could have a year option to show posts from a specific year. It sounded reasonable to add a year: 2025 option, but that small idea also sparked a number of additional thoughts:

• What if you only wanted to list posts from the current year, and the current year changes, well, every year?
• What if you only wanted to list posts that aren’t from the current year?
• What if you wanted to list posts that were written on this day/week/month over the history of your blog?
• What if you wanted to sort your list of posts randomly?
• What if you wanted to combine all of these options into something amazing?

Now you can create all sorts of mashups with Pika post list variables. Want to create a page that shows a list of 10 random posts from 2025? Sure!

{{ posts year: 2025 random: yes limit: 10 }}

Want to create a page with a random post that was written in any prior year on this month? You betcha!

{{ posts_in_stream on_this_month year: not_current random: yes limit: 1 with_excerpts: no }}

And if you’re a daily microblogger with years of posts, on_this_day could be a great (re)discovery tool!

There are some nuances about how this all works. You should definitely read the manual, but some clear points:

• Random is truly a random sort, and if you reload the page you’ll get a new result. (Well, unless you hit a 30-second caching window.) For this reason, if you use random: yes in a post list variable, pagination is turned off.
• You cannot combine on_this_day, on_this_week, and/or on_this_month. If you have multiples of those options in your variable statement, the most specific of them applies. (on_this_day beats on_this_week beats on_this_month.)
• Random sorting is not available on {{ posts_by_year }}.
• Random sorting overrides all other sort options.

Oh, and what if one of these “on this day”-style options returns zero posts? Let’s say you set up a page with a single random on_this_month post as you see in the example above, use this custom CSS on your page to include placeholder text when there are no results:

.site-stream-of-posts:not(:has(*))::after {
  color: var(--color-txt-light) !important;
  content: "Nothing from this day in years past. Check back tomorrow!" !important;
  display: block !important;
  font-size: var(--font-S) !important;
  padding: 1rem !important;
}

This is pretty powerful, eh? Let us know how you use these new variable options!

Original source

Not so long ago we added post previews to Pika. This was a great quality-of-life improvement for many of us writers that like to proof everything one last time before posting. Soon after launching, we learned that some customers wanted to share that preview with others. Starting today, they can!

The preview button now produces a link that you can share with anyone. The preview link is an unguessable URL that expires after 7 days. The link also invalidates the moment you publish your post, though scheduled posts will remain previewable up until they go live. On password-protected blogs, the preview link works without the password prompt as it’s assumed sharing the link is a deliberate choice.

Check it out (link expires in 7 days 😉).

Original source

They said it couldn’t be done. (Well, we said that, well, maybe it couldn’t be done.) Yet we went and did it anyway! Pika now has paginated variables, and that opens up a bunch of new layout possibilities.

Previously we talked about Expert Mode with Pika Variables, but the one major limitation with this advice was if you had more posts than could be displayed by the max limits of a Pika variables, you were stuck inventing your own way to direct readers to the rest of the archive of posts represented by the variable. Now with pagination Pika variables are much more flexible.

Imagine that you want to run a newsletter with completely unique content alongside your regular blog that already has hundreds of posts. You want a homepage that includes just your blog posts, without your newsletter posts, and you want that homepage to allow readers to paginate through your post history. Now you can set that up with Pika variables:

{{ posts_in_stream without_tag: newsletter }}

Then, on your newsletter landing page:

{{ posts tag: newsletter }}

Note: When you do this, don’t put the {{ variables }} in a code block. The code block is necessary here just for blog-posting purposes. Another option is to use the sent_as_newsletter Pika variable option to split out your newsletter posts. Using tags will be preferable if you wish to offer an RSS feed for a set of posts.

We’re curious to see the layouts you will put together now that pagination is fully supported with Pika variables. Microblogs and newsletters living together? Pages that have multiple paginated tagged post sections? Custom tag landing pages? A photo section that pages through one post at a time with the page_size: 1 option? The possibilities are endless!

Pagination is now on by default for Pika variables (so if you do not want this behavior you will need to update your variables to turn pagination off with paginate: no). To set up Homer’s situation above. First, on your custom home page:

Original source

Sometimes you want to share audio or a video, but you don’t want to upload it to some third-party service for embedding. You may even already have a workflow for hosting audio or video at a webhost or CDN provider. If that’s you, I’ve got good news!

Pika now automatically embeds audio and video links as HTML 5 audio/video. Pika looks at the URL extension, so the links do need to end in a supported extension.

For audio, the supported extensions are: aac, flac, m4a, mp3, oga, ogg, opus, wav, weba.

For video: m4v, mov, mp4, webm.

If you’re having trouble with the file rendering, you may also want to check the encoding of the file (audio, video) for browser support.

With this new feature, you can bootstrap your new podcast right here on Pika. We’re excited to see what you come up with!

Original source

Almost daily we get an email with someone asking how they can find other bloggers who are writing with Pika. In those messages many mourn the loss of The Pika Pulse. We do too.

After much thinking about how to do it responsibly, and teasing it in recent months, today I can tell you officially: The Pika Pulse is coming back!

Why Pulse, again?

When we first set out to build Pika, one of our primary goals was to help people build connections. Here’s my writing to the team about that topic way back in December of 2023:

I live in a relatively rural area. There are not many people here that have an interest in these internet and web programming things that I'm interested in. Fifteen-years-ago me would travel 75 minutes one way to go to user group meetings and events to congregate with these folks. Maintaining a personal website and blogging is a way for me to connect with similar folks from all across the world without leaving home.

Sure, it can be done on social, but blogging feels more serious and considered. This matches a temperament that I enjoy and fulfills a personal need. In my 28 years of adulthood I have not found a better way for me to fulfill this need.

Connection is one of the biggest reasons that I blog, and I bet that’s a big reason for a lot of Pika customers as well. I’m also generally blog-curious: How are other people designing their blog? What are they blogging about?

I think The Pika Pulse will be a fantastic way to discover bloggers using Pika, to start building connections with them through blogging, and to be inspired for your own blogging.

What’s new?

For those of you unfamiliar with the original Pulse, the rough idea was a general feed of the latest posts written on Pika, depicted in their Pika theme. There was no upvoting or trending posts. That vibe is mostly retained in the upcoming Pulse, with these updates:

• Pulse will now have two feeds:
  • The “Recent” feed will be similar to the old Pulse. This will be where you can go to discover Pika bloggers. You’ll also be able to mute blogs from this feed to tailor it to your own tastes and interests.
  • The “Following” feed will be a stream of posts from Pika bloggers you choose to follow on Pulse. See the following paragraph (pun intended).
• Pulse will now incorporate user-created Custom CSS to do an even better job of displaying posts in a blogger’s unique style and theme.
• Pika now has codified Pika Rules all Pika blogs must follow, which we’ve consistently improved since we last shut down Pulse. You should read them if you haven’t in awhile.
• We now have internal tooling to help our team better prevent or remove spam and unsavory posts from the Recent feed (and from Pika in general).

Following a Pika blogger on Pulse will be a new feature for Pika users. This isn’t meant to replace subscribing via RSS — we love RSS! The Following feed will be another option to keep up with new posts from your favorite Pika blogs. It’s less like an RSS inbox and more like browsing the blogs you follow in one place, with each blog keeping the visual character that the blogger intended. We think it’s a unique alternative to see what your favorite Pika blogs have written recently. Check in at your leisure.

Between following and muting to make Pulse your own, and with our rules and internal tooling in place, we think this is a much better version of our original vision for discovery and connection on Pika.

What’s next?

The Pika Pulse will be back in a matter of weeks, not months.

Notably, on launch not all Pika blogs will be in the Recent feed — only the blogs we manually approve for Pulse will show up there, and we’re intentionally taking it slow in approving blogs for Pulse. We’re not trying to create a curated feed so much as trying to be mindful of creating a new space that adheres to our Pika Rules and feels welcoming for new bloggers. If you’re not there at launch and think you should be, give it time.

Since it’s been awhile, you should check your Site Visibility settings. If you’d like your blog to be considered for Pulse, make sure to check Settings > It’s OK if my site or posts show up in The Pika Pulse. If you’d rather not share your blog in Pulse, make sure to uncheck this setting.

An experiment for Pika

We’re excited, but also admittedly a little nervous, to flip the switch and turn on The Pika Pulse again. There are just two of us here at Good Enough, and our small team’s primary goal for Pika is making the best software for anyone to write on the internet at their own domain. Our goal is not necessarily to create or moderate public spaces, nor to manage a moderation team.

So while we’re being cautiously optimistic about this second go at Pulse, we’re also going to treat it like an experiment — one we might need to tweak over time, possibly overhaul, or pivot, or if need be again, end. Your feedback during this experiment will be welcomed.

That all said, we’ve been using a version of Pulse ourselves for a few weeks now and it feels so good to be back! We think that you’ll be as excited as we have been to peruse it and discover new blogs. Let’s see how it goes!

~Barry

1. This Site Visibility setting only affects the Recent feed in Pulse. Following is modeled after RSS, so any blog on Pika that isn’t password-protected can be followed and seen in the Following feed.

Original source