Building Pika Out LoudModify

Pika’s latest collection of small updates is rather extensive! Peruse the updates below and you will probably run into an improvement you didn’t know you were wishing for. We hope you’ve been finding your Pika experience more refined and, well, smoother over the past couple of months.

Writing posts and pages:

• Page titles are now optional, just like post titles

• Improved mobile display of adding a link

• Added ability to add #top, mailto:, and tel: as link URLs

• Added footnote support when pasting markdown into the editor

• Added “heading” and “only_headers” optional parameters to the {{ table_of_contents }} variable

• Added ability to set the Page URL before creating a page

• Enabled excerpts in the post editor regardless of if your site is a Stream of posts or List of posts layout

• Added support for uploading WebP and AVIF images

• Added support for Odysee video embeds

• Fixed issue where a post’s custom css was not present in newsletter emails

Viewing your site:

• Improved display of embeds in newsletter emails, including a thumbnail embed for YouTube links

• Included figcaptions when zooming into images

• Added support for zooming guestbook drawings

• Added support for h-card, h-entry, and h-feed microformats

• Added support for Seline analytics

• Added Hebrew translations

• Fixed failing month translations for Hungarian and Latvian translations

• Updated avatar serving to be a smaller file size

Misc & Maintenance:

• Fixed a major N+1¹ query issue for posts or pages with lots of images, speeding HTML rendering up by over 500x in some cases

• Fixed issues with {{ table_of_contents }} variable output when multiple headers had the same text and when headers were outside the excerpt

• Fixed issue where canceling post editing would sometimes warn you that you may lose changes when you never made any changes

• Improved Substack newsletter subscriber import to retain subscriber subscription dates

• Personalized the From address for email newsletters to come from [email protected]

• Self-cleaned newsletter subscribers when an email address hard bounces or is marked as spam

• Added pagination to some places that were missing it

• Added 255 character limit to blog title, post titles, and page titles

• Provided fallback social preview image if image generation fails

• Improved the rate at which we block floods of bots that can saturate our servers

• Updated to Ruby 4

• Updated all Ruby library dependencies to their most recent versions

1. N+1 Queries are a performance problem in which an application makes database queries in a loop, instead of making a single query that returns or modifies all the information at once.

It has been over two years since Pika launched, and we’ve been fortunate to attract hundreds of bloggers from many and varied backgrounds. We’d say each of these bloggers has something in common: an appreciation for simplicity and a willingness to support intentionally built software that has a soul.

With this in mind, we’re very excited to offer something new specifically for Pika Pros: Pika Perks!

Pika Perks are lovely discounts for software built by companies with a similar mindset to us at Good Enough. This is software we use and enjoy every day. When we emailed these companies asking if they’d like to be involved with Pika Perks, they were gracious and responsive and we had lovely conversations. In today’s software world that is an important sign. These companies care!

To check out your Pika Perks, log in to Pika and visit Billing > Perks. We’re happy to announce that we're starting Pika Perks with…

Kagi

Kagi is a paid search engine. Paying for search can feel unusual at first, but once you experience search without ads, surveillance, and harsh noise, you realize being the customer and not the product feels really good. Now with Pika Perks you get 3 months free to experience Kagi Professional for yourself!

EchoFeed

EchoFeed allows you to take any RSS, Atom, or JSON feed and post it to all sorts of social networks and services like Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, and more! For Pika customers, EchoFeed works amazingly well to automatically share your new blog posts on Mastodon and Bluesky. Here’s to $5 off the already affordable EchoFeed Pro subscription.

Unread

Unread is an award-winning RSS feed reader for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The interface is absolutely beautiful and calmingly minimal. It’s perfect for those moments when you just want to sit down and read some things without the clutter that exists on many websites. (Pika websites excepted, naturally. 🙂) Perks provides 50% off your first year of Unread Premium.

Letterbird

Letterbird is Good Enough’s take on providing a pretty contact form that allows people to get in touch with you. You know it, you love it, and it’s long overdue for you to get a discount on Letterbird Pro if you are a Pika Pro subscriber. Pika Perks now provides 25% off your first year of Letterbird Pro.

Remember to take advantage of your Pika Perks, log in to Pika and visit Billing > Perks. If there’s an amazing product out there that you feel honors and respects its customers in a similar way to us here at Good Enough, please let us know as it may be a great fit for Pika Perks!

We’re happy to announce that Pika now has an API!

When choosing how to implement an API for posting and updating blog posts, it became quickly apparent that supporting the Micropub standard was the way to go:

• Micropub is an open standard API for creating and updating posts on websites

• Micropub is supported by many third-party clients

This open standard with third-party client support means that Pika’s posting API should work consistently with what you might already be used to with other platforms. For those of you making use of third-party services or the API, this means it should be easier to move between Pika and other blogging services that support a Micropub API. Of course it should now also be easier to move your personal blogging process from one of those services to Pika. 😊

Along with launching the Micropub API, we are also happy to share that Pika now supports iA Writer and Drafts. Visit those links to find instructions for using these excellent writing tools to create draft posts on Pika. We anticipate adding a few more third-party apps to the mix soon!

For more reading on the API itself, visit our documentation. Note that this first version of the API is a minimal one. For instance, there is no deletion or post list endpoints at this time. If you feel a strong need for these or other features, please let us know. We’d love to hear what you’re planning to build.

Are you using Pika’s Guestbook feature? Isn’t it great?! Go sign our guestbook, we’ll wait…

Today we’re adding a few bits of functionality to make managing your guestbook signings a bit more streamlined.

First is the ability to Hide unapproved signings. Sometimes there’s a signing you’re not ready to approve, but you also don’t want to delete. For these cases, you can now hide the signing.

Second is the ability to Filter your signings in the dashboard. This is useful for when you want to review hidden signings, or haven’t checked in awhile and have a bunch of new signings to approve.

As a reminder, Guestbooks are available to everybody in Pika, no Pro subscription required! If you haven’t yet, you can turn it on in Settings > Labs.

In Pika when you add a page to your site’s navigation, we use the page’s title as the label in the navigation. Pretty simple, but sometimes that’s not what you want.

Now you can set a custom label for pages in your site navigation. Once a site has been added to your navigation in Dashboard > Pages, open its ••• menu and you’ll see a new Custom label for navigation option that leads to this form:

As an example, the page here on Building Pika Out Loud with our contact form is titled Get in touch but now labeled in the navigation above just Contact — exactly how we like it!

Note that this option is also available for non-standard pages like a custom Home page, your Guestbook, and even the default Blog page.

This is just a quick update! All the meta settings you could edit for a post or page (like publish date or custom css) were previously found in a ••• menu in the top-right of the editor. You used to have to click that, and then select the setting you wanted to change, one-at-a-time.

Now all those options can be found with one-click of a new Settings button. This replaces that ••• menu entirely. The benefits here are (1) less clicks and (2) more discoverability.

Happy blogging!