Building Pika Out LoudModify

Fall is all up in our business, and that means it’s time for an update on the little Pika things. Some of these bullet points are small tweaks, while others represent literal weeks of work. This weekend we’ll jump in a pile of leaves to celebrate!

Writing posts and pages:

• At desktop viewport sizes, Pika will now remember if you prefer to keep the Settings sidebar open or closed

• Added a dropdown toggle to the tag editor to see and select from all of your existing tags more easily

• Added an option to preview your newsletter before sending it to everyone

• Added automatic embed support for Bunny Stream video links

• The tags and without_tags Pika variable parameters now accept boolean AND and OR to work with multiple tags

• Pasting into the editor now better removes errant   spaces

• Improved how arrow keys and Enter work with attachments and captions (thanks, Faiz!)

• Specified your chosen language in the logged-in view of Pika so handy browser things like spell check work better
  

Viewing your site:

• Added an option to Site Search to include your pages in search results alongside posts and tags

• All automatic embed services now look a lot better with a working visual style in email newsletters

• Added aria-current="page" to a site’s navigation links when you’re currently viewing that page

• When possible Pika will pause video/audio when another video/audio file starts playing on the same page

• Added <category> and <author> tags to RSS feeds (most RSS clients don’t surface these, but some do)
  

Misc & Maintenance:

• Added support for Bandcamp URLs for posts created via the Micropub API

• Updated Theme settings so its easier to preview color theme changes

• Added a “Shuffle” option to help you spice up your color theme

• Improved the instructions on the custom domain Settings page

• Fixed issues with a site’s custom CSS and how posts display on Pulse and in email newsletters

• Fixed issues with the Micropub API’s capability to update posts with new images and tables

• Fixed issue where the countdown for a newsletter to be sent could be stale on the Dashboard

• Completed a very large restructuring of our database to prepare for some future changes 💪😅 

• Improved the structure of our database while we were at it

• Created import scripts for Day One, Tumblr, and Posthaven

• Fixed silent errors with toolbar popovers

• Fixed up some deployment and caching issues that could lead to un-styled blog posts
  

Now you can edit multiple posts at once in Pika. Well, specifically you can add tags to, remove tags from, or delete multiple posts at the same time:

You can find the new “Bulk edit” option under the ••• dropdown in your Posts Dashboard. It’ll add a new bulk edit bar above the list, and checkboxes to every post. This also works after you’ve searched or filtered the list to a specific tag. We hope this makes managing your blogs just a tad bit easier.

I always feel a bit itchy deleting things. On computers, trash cans seem to be everywhere. On my computer I can recover files from the trash. On my phone I can recover photos from trash. In this case, trash is good.

Now when deleting posts or pages on Pika, they aren’t gone instantly. Instead, they go to a trash bin. If you change your mind the next day, you can recover your trashed post. Sweet relief! Trashed items won’t be deleted permanently until 30 days after you trashed them, so you have time to reconsider.

Ah, that sure eases my small anxieties around deleting items from Pika!

(Oh, and for you Micropub API users, post delete came along for the ride!)

There’s already multiple ways to format your posts in Pika’s editor: clicking the toolbar, using a keyboard shortcut, writing in markdown. Today, we’re introducing yet another way: “/slash” commands.

Just type “/” (forward slash) and you’ll get a dropdown of Pika formatting options. You can navigate through the list with arrow keys and select, as well as continue typing to narrow down the list.

We hope every blogger can find the formatting option(s) they prefer here at Pika!

Update: An earlier version of this post suggested slash commands would only work at the beginning of a paragraph and only support block-level formats. That is no longer the case! Feel free to type /link in the middle of your sentences.

When we set out to build Pika, our north star was to create the best place to write your thoughts on the web. That means a great writing editor first, both in terms of features and design. We aim to create a blogging platform that makes you want to write, and we’re continually working towards that goal.

For those of you who write long-form, today we’re introducing two new features to Pika’s editor that you’ll typically find in other great writing software:

• Focus mode highlights where your text caret is while you’re typing. You can choose to focus the line, the sentence, or the paragraph you’re in.

• Typewriter mode keeps your text caret always in the very center of the viewport, even as you create new lines.

You’ll find these options at the bottom of the editor toolbar’s ••• “More” menu:

Together, these two tools can really elevate your writing habits and ability to get words to page. We hope you find them useful!

Sometimes you want to play around with the color themes on your Pika blog, but you’re a little nervous to lose track of your existing custom color settings. Now you can save up to three color themes, making it easy to swap between them before deciding which one you want to make permanent.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: color theme shuffle! Check it out:

We’re excited to have this new quality-of-life improvement for our own blogs, and we hope this update will be useful to you as well!