Pika Release Notes

Writing posts

• Added Pika variable processing capabilities in about and custom footer text
• Added the ability to filter post-based Pika variables by the existence of a post title (see the docs)
• Removed the “Need inspiration?” prompt pop-up (you can still get a writing prompt from the ••• editor menu)
• Fixed issue with edited tag names not propagating to draft or scheduled posts
• Fixed issue where sometimes Pika’s editor would add a space to your writing where a space should not be
• Fixed issue where sometimes the Pika editor placeholder text would linger a bit too long

Viewing your site

• Added support for the new Plausible analytics script tag format
• Added support for NeatStats analytics
• Added support for Abstracts analytics
• Added an accessible “Skip to content” link for users of screen readers
• Improved support for right-to-left languages
• Zoomed images on mobile will now zoom to full width
• Fixed issue with newsletter markup in some email clients
• Fixed issue with alias URLs that contain query params

Misc & Maintenance

• Improved newsletter delivery pipeline, and added better reporting so we can keep an eye on our system health
• Hardened newsletter subscription forms against list-poisoning and credential-stuffing bots
• Added an icon to your dashboard so you know which posts were delivered as a newsletter to your subscribers
• Overhauled our Pika variable processing code, making it much easier to support and evolve Pika variables in the future.
• Fixed up issue where Pika variables were rendering inside of code blocks
• Updated our AI block list to prevent more and newer bots
• Improved newsletter unsubscribe link, making it less predictable
• Improved certain site markup to be more accessible to screen readers
• Improved how existing post excerpt marks are handled when switching from stream of posts to list of titles layout
• Improved background job prioritization and handling
• Fixed up some bugs in custom domain settings when customers leave and return to Pika
• Normalized all tag slugs that were still a bit…off since the launch of the tags feature
• Added pagination in some places that did not have it before
• Updated to the latest version of Rails
• Updated library dependencies to patch security holes
• Always fighting spam accounts

LaTeX Mathematic Notation

Yesterday we announced a refreshed editor toolbar primarily built to give us space to expand our editor’s capabilities, for features like color highlighting. Today we announce another update that work enabled: LaTeX Mathematic Notation.

If you don’t know what that is, fear not, you can safely ignore this post! But for those of you in the know and who want to use the LaTeX typesetting system to express professional mathematic and scientific equations in your posts, we think you’ll feel pretty positive about this update! (bad science joke)

There’s 2 ways to add LaTeX to your posts. You can either wrap the expression in single $..$ signs to create an inline math equation like 𝐸=𝑚𝑐2, or double $$..$$ signs to create full blocks like this:

There’s also a new LaTeX option in the toolbar’s ••• “More” menu. (Also one thing to note is that simpler places like RSS and Email Newsletters can only display the underlying expression.)

We look forward to the posts on Pika getting a little nerdier with this update 🤓 especially as we consider bringing back the Pulse this year…

This one feels good. We’ve added a new {{ posts_in_stream }} Pika variable for you to play with.

If your blog is configured to use the stream of posts layout, this variable isn’t quite as powerful as that built-in layout. For instance, a variable on a page cannot provide the means paginate through all of your posts in a stream. However, with some creative thinking you can really do some interesting things.

New {{ posts_in_stream }} Pika variable

First, let’s say that your blog is set to the “list of titles” layout. And let’s say you want a home page that shows your latest post in full, and then links out to the rest of your posts in a list format? Now you can do that!

Welcome to my homepage. Also, I love to blog.
Here's my latest post:

{{ posts_in_stream limit: 1 with_excerpts: no }}

All posts # link this to yoursite.pika.page/posts

And here’s what you’d see on that homepage:

Or how about if you’d like to share your latest post, then a list of your 10 prior posts, followed by a link to all of your posts? Just do it!

Welcome to my homepage. Also, I love to blog.
Here's my latest post:

{{ posts_in_stream limit: 1 with_excerpts: no }}

Recent posts:

{{ posts limit: 10 skip: 1 }}

All posts # link this to yoursite.pika.page/posts

Oh, yes, astute reader, we’ve added a skip option to all post-based variables (like {{ posts }} ). This option let’s you skip the first n posts that would be rendered by a variable. Here’s what it will look like toward the end of that post:

We think there’s a lot more that can be done with these simple new Pika variable tools. We’re excited to see what you come up with!

New editor toolbar

One of our core Pika Principles is to make Pika the best place on the Internet for writing a blog. We think we’re doing a pretty good enough job so far! But over the past year, we hit a wall: we want to keep expanding the functionality of the editor, but the toolbar was getting pretty crammed — we were simply running out of pixels for more buttons. We even put the recent Spoiler block feature into the bubble menu instead of the main toolbar.

Today we’re excited to announce an all-new, built-from-the-ground-up editor toolbar for Pika!

Besides the refreshed visual design, new icons, and new tooltips with keyboard shortcut symbols, it’s also more accessible via keyboard navigation (you can Tab to it and use your arrow keys).

But the impetus for this change was always space. We now have room to add buttons for features we already support but weren’t part of the toolbar:

• Dividers (Horizontal Rules)
• Footnotes
• H1 – H4
• Inline code
• Soft return
• Spoilers (was previously in bubble menu)
• Underlining

And as an added bonus at launch, we took this opportunity to add more functionality to the Pika editor right away:

• Text color
• Highlight color
• Justify text alignment
• Small text

You’ll also notice we removed the bubble menu that previously displayed when selecting text — that was always a stop-gap for a sub-par mobile toolbar experience, and it had its own issues. Now if you blog from your phone, the new toolbar is always accessible, at any scroll, even with the virtual keyboard open.

Our new editor toolbar is a new foundation we’re excited to build upon as we continue striving toward that Pika Principle to make Pika the best place on the Internet for writing a blog. If there’s a feature we’re missing or some other way we can make writing on Pika better for you, we want to know.

If you haven’t written a post in awhile, this week is a good time to get back to it. Happy writing!

By default, all of your Pika posts have a “Back to all posts” link at the bottom. On our quest to keep Pika simple but also offer some flexibility and site customization, today we’re introducing two more options you can enable to direct your readers to more of your writing.

You’ll now see a new “Blog post navigation” setting in Settings with additional options for your posts: either showing links to your previous & next posts, or simply listing your most recent posts. You can choose which options you want for your blog.

You can see what those options look like right here on this site, at the bottom of this or any post. Enjoy!

When we first built Pika, one of our design goals was to make sure your posts in the editor looked as close as possible to what they’ll look like on your Pika blog. We think we’ve mostly succeeded at that! Still, there’s a lot of anxiety wrapped up in hitting that Publish button and the post not looking right.

Today we’re introducing a “Preview” button for your not-yet-published posts, so you can see exactly what that post will look like on your Pika blog (and double-check links and stuff).

We’ll note that this preview is only for that specific post when you click that button, and again only for posts that are not yet published. But this is especially useful if you’re a heavy user of Custom CSS, which we don’t load into the editor for technical reasons.

Spoiler block

Sometimes you want to talk about THAT THING YOU JUST SAW, but you don’t want to ruin it for everyone. That’s where the new spoiler block comes in:

▶ Here’s an example

You can use a spoiler like you might use an HTML details tag. Create a FAQ with the questions as the summary and the answers hidden in the details. Want to share some code, but only with people who are really into it? Put the code in a spoiler. Really anything where you’d like to provide additional information in line, but don’t want to overload the average reader with everything all at once.

Please note that the only way to access the spoiler block right now is by highlighting some text and clicking Spoiler in the bubble menu. We plan to add a spoiler button to the main toolbar as well, but the toolbar is getting crowded and we have some work to do to make some space. We just didn’t want to hold back this feature to wait for toolbar improvements.

And there you go. Watch movies, read books, and spoil away!

Lots of things have been happening in Pika aside from the bigger announcements you have seen on this blog. After launching site translations and the newsletter beta, there have been many tweaks and improvements. Code libraries have been updated, bugs have been squashed, and designs have been finessed. All in a day’s, or a couple months’, work!

Writing posts

• Added subscription date to newsletter subscriber list
• Tweaked sorting of newsletter subscriber list

Viewing your site

• Added customization option for the guestbook entry submission button
• For those with the feature enabled, added a “reply by email” footer to the RSS feed
• Added a noindex,nofollow meta tag to all pages on sites that disallow search engine indexing, adding additional protection to our prior robots.txt implementation
• Cleaned up meta and open graph descriptions so they did not include image placeholder text
• Added Hungarian translations
• Cleaned up the “list of titles” design layout to better handle language translations for months and days
• Various improvements to language translations (thank you, customers!)

Misc & Maintenance

• Fixed a bug in image zooming
• Fixed a bug where Pup accounts could not create navigation items when they maxed out their allotment of pages
• Fixed a bug when editing posts with Vimeo embeds
• Fixed a bug when pasting YouTube Music playlist links
• Fixed a bug where tag-based Pika variables would include tags that only exist on draft posts
• Fixed up some cursor highlighting issues
• Fixed up newsletter subscription form that was incorrectly showing an RSS feed link on password-protected blogs
• Work with vendor to fix bug in email delivery for certain email/blog name combos
• Upgraded nearly all Ruby library dependencies
• Upgraded database server
• Maintenance work to improve ongoing server health

Social preview image option

Since the beginning, Pika has had an awesome social preview image, which combines your post title, blog name, and avatar. It also places these elements in a design that honors the actual theme selections for your site. It’s quite fetching, but sometimes your blog is more photo-forward and you’d rather have your photos front-and-center when you share posts on socials. Now you have that option!

Visit Settings and click on the Use the first image of a post or page as its social preview option. Now, if there are any images in a post or page that you share on Bluesky or Mastodon or wherever, the first image will be used as your social share image. If no images are found in your post, the default option will continue to display.

Limitation

Please note that one limitation of the feature is that gif files are ignored since any animated gifs aren’t going to play nice with social network previews.