We at Good Enough are building this blogging software, Pika, right out loud here on Pika. Please follow along, cheer us on, and give us feedback. Thank you!
Pika has added one more embed to the stable: Loom. Loom is one of the most widely used screen-recording platforms, making it a powerful option when it comes to instructional and educational content. We’ve even used it here at Pika to help show how to use our tags feature:
As is typical with Pika embeds, just copy the URL of your video (e.g. https://www.loom.com/share/364d4c5072e645e2863b100bc4ec45be) and paste it into the Pika editor. We’ll take care of the rest.
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.
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.
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!
It’s always fun to fulfill a long-standing request in Pika, and today’s one of those fun days. You have always been able to backdate posts, but now you can also schedule posts to be published in the future!
You will probably notice that email newsletters have come along for the ride. When your scheduled post is published by Pika, a newsletter will be scheduled for delivery 15 minutes after publishing time. Excellent!
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.
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
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:
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!
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. 🐶
We love to make it easy to take a multimedia link from the web and embed it into your Pika blog posts. While us internet veterans get the concept of sharing via embed code, most people online understand links and that’s about it. With Pika, we hope every person is able to write blog posts that share videos, music, and more in interesting and appealing ways.
The first of our new embed options is SoundCloud, a streaming service that has lots of music that can’t be found on, or doesn’t get surfaced by, any of the major music streaming platforms. It’s great for discovery!
And a second new embed option is Mixcloud. Mixcloud is an awesome streaming service for DJs to share their sets with the world. Here’s a great one from friend-of-Pika, DJ Deep Answer:
We have spent a fair bit of time recently working on the upcoming email newsletter feature. In the midst of that work, background images were added to Pika themes! And a few other things got accomplished as well…
The 90’s called and demanded that Pika should make it easier to add background images to your blog. Who are we to deny The 90’s?
Simply visit Settings > Theme, select a custom color theme, and upload your tiny image. We’ll tile that image as the background of your site.
Where do you get these tile-able images? We recommend browsing this vast archive. And bonus: We’ve added Times New Roman as a font theme option, so you can really lean in.
And to help you get to really blogging like it’s The 90’s (only better), we’ve got a limited-time offer for 15% off your first year of Pika Pro. Just use coupon code PIKACITIES at checkout. Hurry, though, because the offer ends on June 13th.
As we continued to be very focused on Jelly this spring, Pika tweaks have been a light. Yet still things continue to be improved!
Sometimes when you write a longer blog post, it’s handy to add headings to subsections of your writing. Sometimes when posts get long, you’d like to link directly to those headings. This can be useful for sharing a section of a post with a friend, or for creating a table of contents at the top of a longer post.
You can find a link to a heading by hovering or focusing on the heading itself. Here it is in action:
Replying by email is a feature that I added to my blog in the time before it was hosted at Pika. Comments on a blog can be nice, but they invariably come with the baggage of managing moderation or spam. Social media is another way to talk with others about your blog posts, but that format has its downsides as well. I’m sure by now we’re all aware of those trade-offs!
When I added a reply by email link on the bottom of my blog, I started to receive occasional messages from folks who I never realized were reading my blog. It turned out to be a really nice experience! Some emails were short notes of thanks or encouragement. Some emails were longer messages with discussion about my writing and their related experiences. I especially enjoyed the latter emails, which led to ongoing threads of one-on-one discussion. These conversations led me to having new thoughts about the topic and to me making a connection with another person somewhere out there in the world. These conversations reminded me of the hope and positivity I had for the internet thirty years ago when I first started spending time online.
With that background, I’m happy to announce the addition of reply by email to Pika! Visit Settings > Labs to turn on the feature. Then enter either your email address or your Letterbird username and you’ll see a new “Reply by email” link at the bottom of each of your blog posts:
Oh, and if you enjoy a blog post and you see a reply by email link on that blog, you should reply to it. It’s these conversations that help move the needle on making the online world a more positive, uplifting place. People love a friendly note!
Let us know how you like the new reply by email feature by, well, replying to this post by email! 👇
—Barry
I bet when some of you read about Pika’s new Spotify embed feature you were wondering if Apple Music would work as well? Sorry, it didn’t work…that is until it did! Apple Music embedding is now supported in Pika. Yay!
Once again, grab a link to an album, artist, song, or playlist that you wish to share, and paste it into Pika’s editor. 🎶 Rock out! 🎶
Pika has supported easy YouTube embedding from the beginning–simply paste a YouTube link and the magic happens. We recently added Vimeo embed, and now it’s time to get into the music with Spotify embedding.
It’s simple! Just grab the link to the album, artist, song, podcast, or playlist you wish to share, and paste it into Pika’s editor. 🎶 Ta-da! 🎶
It’s Friday. Time for you to share those weekend playlists!
Blogging has long had a cross-over with programming education. Before Stack Overflow existed, searching the internet for answers to your technical questions would (sometimes) lead you to blog post with an answer. Often, when I (Barry) solved a challenging problem in my code, I would blog about it in hopes of helping the next person who ran into the same issue. (This also led to numerous experiences of me searching for an error message and finding…my own blog post from years earlier about the subject. 😆)
It is important for Pika to support blogging about code, and I’m happy to say that Pika now includes the ability to have syntax highlighting in your code blocks! If you click the code block button in the toolbar (or type the Markdown ``` shortcut), you will get the same ol’ code block you’re used to in Pika:
But now in the Pika editor you can select a programming language to trigger a new design, complete with syntax highlighting:
Personal bloggers land in one of these two camps:
“I want all links to open in the same window”
“I want any links that leave my site to open in a new tab”
Pika has forced all of its bloggers to live in the first camp, but it’s high time Pika also supported the second camp. Visit Settings and click on Open links to other sites in a new tab to make all external links on your site open in a new tab.
Give it a try and let us know if you see any issues!
