Pika Release Notes

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!

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 !

Image delivery and tuning

Since day one Pika has been a nice place to post images. While Pika will always be a blog software and never be designed to be a direct Instagram alternative, we find that blogs are a great place to share screenshots and travelogues, the latter of which greatly benefit from lovely pictures.

Also, since day one Pika customers have been located all across the globe. This means Pika writers have readers from all across the globe. Images being delivered from Ohio, United States, doesn’t make a lot of sense to most readers of Pika blogs.

As of today Pika now serves images from a global content delivery network (CDN) to all readers of Pika blogs. You should generally see much-improved speed when loading up your published blog posts that include images because those images should arrive at your browser from a server that’s much closer to your physical location.

Photo performance should be also be improved because Pika now tunes your images before serving them to your readers. This greatly reduces the actual file sizes of the images. While the tuning results will vary for every image, here’s an example:

A view looking out over the valley below Cortona, Tuscany, Italy. Houses on the hillside to the left, hills in the distance, fields in the valley, and a lake can be seen in the far distance.
Cortona, Tuscany, Italy

Here’s what Pika does to streamline those images:

• For the images that are displayed when your post loads, Pika serves a resized version appropriate to the smaller image size that’s displayed on screen.
• For the images that are displayed when an image is clicked for zooming purposes, Pika serves a differently-resized version.
• You can always cmd-click/ctrl-click (macOS/Windows) to open the image in a new tab at the original resolution.
• In all cases, we strip much of the Exif data from the image file. This includes removing location and camera hardware information. We’re sure to retain metadata that is important to proper image display, like orientation, color space, and copyright information.
• We apply a small bit of compression to the files.

The stats for this image…

Original before processing: 4.2 MB
Display: 1 MB
Zoom: 3.8 MB
Original after processing: 4 MB

We could definitely add more compression than this, but at Pika we’re sticklers for displaying your photos with no compromises. When we tried even a little more compression, we weren’t happy with the results in terms of sharpness or color.

Some other particularities about the current implementation:

• We aren’t touching GIFs. They are complicated, and we’re going to keep serving them direct from our servers as they’ve always been. We’ll probably improve them down the road.
• For the technical folk out there, we tried the WebP and AVIF formats, but we couldn’t get either of them to a quality-performance ratio that was acceptable to us. We will likely play around with these in the future as well.

Barry will be writing a technical post about the stack we’re using to provide tuned images on a CDN [ed: here it is]. Look for that to be linked here in a future post, or shared on our socials.

We hope you find your Pika reading experience much improved by this change.
Let us know if you have any feedback!