Pika Release Notes

À la manière d'Ali Baba

Recently we added the ability to set your site language, and now we’re supercharging it. Pika now offers translations for many languages right out of the box. These will appear on your public site the moment you change your language selection in Settings.

At launch Pika supports the following languages:

• Arabic
• Bengali
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Vietnamese

If the language you are blogging in is not listed here, please do request it. We’ll be happy to add it as soon as we can. And if your language is already supported, but you find mistakes in our implementation, please let us know. We’ll admit that the great AI in the sky helped us bootstrap this feature, and we’d love to fine tune it with your help. Thank you in advance!

Over time Pika’s language support will grow, and we’ll continue to maintain a list of all supported languages in our help section.

Pika has had the good fortune to attract blog authors who write in many languages. Today we’re offering a starting point for them to properly represent their Pika blogs as the language they are intended to be. In your Pika settings, you can now choose the language of your blog:

When this language is selected, here’s what will happen:

• The tag on your site will include a lang attribute with your chosen language (and locale if necessary)
• Your RSS feeds will indicate the language of your content
• The open graph tags on your site will also indicate your language and locale

While this is all behind the scenes, you should see a number of accessibility benefits. Your language selection will improve automatic translation detection by browsers, hyphenation, RSS feed reader behavior, and more. This is a starting point, and in the future we would like to offer more capabilities to override the language that is used throughout your Pika site.

The documentation for these language settings is challenging to say the least, so do let us know if you see any mistakes in our implementation.

Pika’s newsletter feature is now in an open beta!

Pika’s newsletter feature is now in an open beta! This means all Pika Pros now have the feature and there’s no more need to contact Pika support in order to get access. Just visit Settings > Labs and turn it on.

With this launch we needed to consider what the subscriber limit should be for a Pika Pro account. We got out our backs-of-napkins, did some math, and landed at 1000 subscribers. At this moment Pika doesn’t offer a Pro+ or Mega Pro account, so if you find that limitation just isn’t going to work for you, please write us and we can figure something out.

Lots of updates since last time:

• Added more text customization

• Added user interface translations via Pika’s new site translations

• Improved code block handling in newsletter emails

• Added pagination to the newsletter subscriber list Just in Case™

• Stripped newsletter subscription form Pika variable if it is included in a post that is sent via email (not the good kind of inception)

• Generally improved Pika variable handling in newsletter emails

• Fixed a bug in setting the proper URL host in the newsletter context

• Fixed a bug in email sending for accounts with a comma in their blog’s name (IYKYK)

Pika Newsletter Beta Release Notes

We recently launched the Pika newsletter in beta, and we’re so thankful to those of you who have signed up. Lots of great feedback means lots of great changes. Here’s the latest:

• Added an option to override the reply-to email address on newsletter emails
• Added text customization options for the newsletter subscription interface (form, messages, etc)
• Improved subscription form styling
• Stopped showing unverified subscribers in the Newsletter tab
• Started expiring newsletter verification links after 7 days
• Added an option to not automatically include newsletter forms on your site
• Added a Pika variable so you can place a newsletter subscription form on any post or page
• Fixed an issue with some word-spacing compression in the newsletter text
• Cleaned up the email itself, including improving various styles and adding placeholder text for embedded iframes

We’ve done our best to keep our newsletter documentation up-to-date with these changes. Continue to let us know if you have any feedback!

Newsletter feature

As hinted over a month ago on our socials, we’ve been working on a simple newsletter feature for Pika. It’s taken a little longer than we would have liked, in part due to vacations, in part due to “it always takes longer,” and in part due to the perils of HTML-styling for email clients. 🐶

The newsletter beta is available now (!) for anyone who would like to give it a try. Since the newsletter feature is a Pro-only feature, the beta will also require you to be a Pro to give it a try. If you’re on the fence about Pika Pro, please don’t worry about signing up for a month of Pika Pro to give the newsletter feature a try. If it turns out Pika’s not quite right for your needs, we’ll be happy to refund you.

We’ve put up a page in our help center to answer most of the questions you might have about the Pika newsletter feature, but don’t hesitate to reach out if you have more questions! And if you’d like to try the beta, let us know !

Exporting your Pika blog

Exporting your Pika blog has been a support-based process in the past. You would email us, we would generate an export, and then we’d send it to you via email. While it worked, it was a time-consuming process. And we know that for some people having to send that email to ask for an export may have put them off getting an export at all.

The good news is that now you can generate your own exports without having to write us! Scroll down to the bottom of your Settings page and you’ll see a new link to Export your posts and pages. Click on through and you’ll find the option to export in the following formats: CSV, JSON, or XML. You may run an export once per day, and they’ll remain downloadable for 14 days before being automatically deleted from our servers.

So if you like to occasionally download your blog posts for storage on your home computer, now you can do that whenever you please. (Well, whenever you please, once per day. 🙂) If you ever decide Pika is no longer the right fit for you, these export formats should allow you to import your Pika posts and pages into many of the other blogging software options on the market.

And for those of you considering Pika for your blog, we can handle importing from those other software options as well! That’s still a manual process, so drop us a line if you’d like to make the move.

Hot on the heels of Filters Posts by Tag, we’ve now added a dedicated section of the Dashboard to manage all of your tags!

At the bottom of the tag filter dropdown, you’ll see a new link to “Edit tags” which will take you to a place where you can do just that. The only thing about tags you can edit is the name, and doing so will update the tag on all of your posts. Perhaps there will be more functionality here in the future, but only time will tell…

This filter dropdown will appear once you have one published tag.

Writing posts

• Cmd-K/Ctrl-K now opens the link toolbar item on Firefox
• Improve editor paste handling for pastes from Apple Notes and Google Docs

Viewing your site

• Greatly reduced the amount of JavaScript files referenced and loaded on published sites
• Unified embed styling across all supported embeds
• Added titles to iframe embeds for improved accessibility
• Optimized font loading
• Added Catalan translations
• Always use “about this blog” for HTML meta description tags, whether you have a custom home page or not
• Several improvements to the image lightbox, in addition to adding navigation:
  • Made images responsive in real time to changing browser size
  • Improved image centering when a scrollbar is present
  • Refined handling when vertically-swiping a lightbox image

Misc & Maintenance

• Added ability to edit external navigation link text
• Improved the experience of entering Custom CSS
• Built some improved tools to moderate accounts when they run afoul of the Pika Rules
• Updated to the latest version of Rails
• Unified error page styling
• Moved to a new system for processing server logs