2026-06-10 03:58:00
Pika has supported writing your blog in a non-English language for nearly a year. For many languages, Pika has also been able to provide translations for the language across your site. One missing link, though, is for folks who blog in more than one language, and we’re happy today to announce that we’ve closed that gap.
To change the language on an individual post or page, simply visit the post’s Settings and select the new language via Set language.
Your site will continue to be translated in the primary language you set for your blog, but individual pages and posts will have the following changes:
The <html> tag for the page will include a lang attribute with your chosen language (and locale if necessary) for the page
Your RSS feeds will still indicate your site language globally, but each individual post will indicate the post language if it differs from your site language
The open graph tags on the page will also indicate your chosen language and locale for the page
We hope this goes a long way to better supporting those of you who blog in multiple languages!
2026-06-05 00:06:50
Over the years, many who blog tend to move their site around to different hosts, or change their domain names. A big pain in this process is when their internal links are pointing to full URLs that may include old domain names.
For example, before today if we wanted to link to our guestbook we would need to enter the URL https://pika.pika.page/guestbook in the editor’s link dialog. If we decided move our blog to https://pikablog.page in the future, we’d have to remember to update that link as well.
If instead we could have linked the word guestbook to /guestbook, a domain-relative URL, that guestbook link would Just Work™ after our domain change.
The good news is that Pika now supports relative links!
And whenever you add a new link via the handy link search, you will get a relative link automatically:
If you generate an export, it will relative links as well, so if you move to a new service your internal links should continue to work well at your new home.
This was a pretty big change, reaching into all sorts of areas of Pika, so do let us know if you see anything amiss. Oh, and also sign our guestbook!
Note: Any links that you’ve created on existing posts and pages are not automatically updated to be relative. You will need to update these links manually if you’d like them to be relative links.
2026-06-03 22:56:00
A while back a customer asked if the Pika variable to list out blogs posts could have a year option to show posts from a specific year. It sounded reasonable to add a year: 2025 option, but that small idea also sparked a number of additional thoughts:
What if you only wanted to list posts from the current year, and the current year changes, well, every year?
What if you only wanted to list posts that aren’t from the current year?
What if you wanted to list posts that were written on this day/week/month over the history of your blog?
What if you wanted to sort your list of posts randomly?
What if you wanted to combine all of these options into something amazing?
Now you can create all sorts of mashups with Pika post list variables. Want to create a page that shows a list of 10 random posts from 2025? Sure!
{{ posts year: 2025 random: yes limit: 10 }}Want to create a page with a random post that was written in any prior year on this month? You betcha!
{{ posts_in_stream on_this_month year: not_current random: yes limit: 1 with_excerpts: no }}And if you’re a daily microblogger with years of posts, on_this_day could be a great (re)discovery tool!
There are some nuances about how this all works. You should definitely read the manual, but some clear points:
Random is truly a random sort, and if you reload the page you’ll get a new result. (Well, unless you hit a 30-second caching window.) For this reason, if you use random: yes in a post list variable, pagination is turned off.
You cannot combine on_this_day, on_this_week, and/or on_this_month. If you have multiples of those options in your variable statement, the most specific of them applies. (on_this_day beats on_this_week beats on_this_month.)
Random sorting is not available on {{ posts_by_year }}.
Random sorting overrides all other sort options.
Oh, and what if one of these “on this day”-style options returns zero posts? Let’s say you set up a page with a single random on_this_month post as you see in the example above, use this custom CSS on your page to include placeholder text when there are no results:
.site-stream-of-posts:not(:has(*))::after {
color: var(--color-txt-light) !important;
content: "Nothing from this day in years past. Check back tomorrow!" !important;
display: block !important;
font-size: var(--font-S) !important;
padding: 1rem !important;
}This is pretty powerful, eh? Let us know how you use these new variable options!
2026-05-29 23:17:04
Not so long ago we added post previews to Pika. This was a great quality-of-life improvement for many of us writers that like to proof everything one last time before posting. Soon after launching, we learned that some customers wanted to share that preview with others. Starting today, they can!
The preview button now produces a link that you can share with anyone. The preview link is an unguessable URL that expires after 7 days. The link also invalidates the moment you publish your post, though scheduled posts will remain previewable up until they go live. On password-protected blogs, the preview link works without the password prompt as it’s assumed sharing the link is a deliberate choice.
Check it out (link expires in 7 days 😉).
2026-05-26 23:36:00
They said it couldn’t be done. (Well, we said that, well, maybe it couldn’t be done.) Yet we went and did it anyway! Pika now has paginated variables, and that opens up a bunch of new layout possibilities.
Previously we talked about Expert Mode with Pika Variables, but the one major limitation with this advice was if you had more posts than could be displayed by the max limits of a Pika variables, you were stuck inventing your own way to direct readers to the rest of the archive of posts represented by the variable. Now with pagination Pika variables are much more flexible.
Imagine that you want to run a newsletter with completely unique content alongside your regular blog that already has hundreds of posts. You want a homepage that includes just your blog posts, without your newsletter posts, and you want that homepage to allow readers to paginate through your post history. Now you can set that up with Pika variables:
Pagination is now on by default for Pika variables (so if you do not want this behavior you will need to update your variables to turn pagination off with paginate: no). To set up Homer’s situation above. First, on your custom home page:
{{ posts_in_stream without_tag: newsletter }}Then, on your newsletter landing page:
{{ posts tag: newsletter }}Note: When you do this, don’t put the {{ variables }} in a code block. The code block is necessary here just for blog-posting purposes. Another option is to use the sent_as_newsletter Pika variable option to split out your newsletter posts. Using tags will be preferable if you wish to offer an RSS feed for a set of posts. Here’s all the documentation.
We’re curious to see the layouts you will put together now that pagination is fully supported with Pika variables. Microblogs and newsletters living together? Pages that have multiple paginated tagged post sections? Custom tag landing pages? A photo section that pages through one post at a time with the page_size: 1 option? The possibilities are endless!
2026-05-22 22:49:00
Sometimes you want to share audio or a video, but you don’t want to upload it to some third-party service for embedding. You may even already have a workflow for hosting audio or video at a webhost or CDN provider. If that’s you, I’ve got good news!
Pika now automatically embeds audio and video links as HTML 5 audio/video. Pika looks at the URL extension, so the links do need to end in a supported extension.
For audio, the supported extensions are: aac, flac, m4a, mp3, oga, ogg, opus, wav, weba.
For video: m4v, mov, mp4, webm.
If you’re having trouble with the file rendering, you may also want to check the encoding of the file (audio, video) for browser support.
With this new feature, you can bootstrap your new podcast right here on Pika. We’re excited to see what you come up with!