2024-12-20 23:47:03
Today we are excited to shore up a long-missing piece of the Pika puzzle: footnotes. Yay!
When writing a blog post, footnotes are a common thing to reach for when you want to add an aside to your thoughts without disturbing the flow of your writing. They are also good for anyone posting more-researched writing that calls for a bit of attribution. Lots of you have wanted proper footnote support since the launch of Pika.
Here’s how they work:
Type your words and then [^1] to add a footnote
Type up your footnote below
Continue writing
Type [^2] for your next footnote
Etc
Maybe a GIF works better?
As you can see, this feature uses the Markdown syntax1 to create a footnote. There is currently no toolbar item for footnotes, but we’ll add one as soon as we can. While Markdown is handy, toolbar options are important for those who don’t have Markdown engrained into their heads. We need time to work on some design for this as the toolbar is getting a bit…large.
We hope you enjoy the new footnotes feature. Happy holidays!
2024-12-06 23:34:24
Blogging can be a solitary activity. In my idealistic moments I say, “That’s okay. I blog for me, not for you or for anyone else!” If you’re already of that mind, please stay of that mind. It’s a super power and I say lean into it.
For the rest of us, though, there is a bit of ego involved in publishing our words on the internet. We’ve had many and numerous requests from Pika peeps who want to be able to see what other Pika folks are writing (and who want others to be able to see what they are writing). Finally, for you and for us, we are introducing The Pika Pulse.
Please note: The Pika Pulse is in an alpha state, and for the moment you must be logged in to Pika in order to see it. We’re not quite ready to unveil it to the world yet. Luckily a Pika account is free–sign up!
Our goal with Pika is to help anyone express themselves on the internet with ease. We want to help you do that in your own space. The Pika Pulse, and any similar features that we develop, will have this in mind. That’s why we prefer to build things that help you discover Pika blogs rather than tools to enable “consuming more content.”
There are a number of indie blog networks out there doing interesting things with discovery. Some blogs have a “likes” construct and incorporate that into how they build their feed. Others do manual curation.
We like all of those ideas, and we even started by implementing a manually-curated set of posts to share. However, once Shawn and I got into building the curated feed we decided to put up a page for ourselves showing the latest Pika posts in a stream layout. It turns out the stream of posts really got us excited. There were some lovely posts being written on Pika every day–y’all are interesting!
So we switched gears to build The Pika Pulse. The Pika Pulse is designed to help you discover all of the great personal blogs being written at Pika. While generally The Pulse represents what has recently been published on Pika, it does not include every post written. We automatically exclude:
Blogs that explicitly opt out (Settings > Additional Options)
Link-farming bloggers
We will also exclude posts or entire blogs at our own discretion. This could be due to sensitive content, company blogs, or other reasons. The Pulse is meant to represent writings by people, which is why we will generally exclude company blogs. (Not our own blog, though. We’re keeping that in!)
New blogs are generally not included in The Pika Pulse until they've been active for a short time and have shown that they are being written by real people writing real words.
Honestly, it’s not rocket science. What you see is a stream of recent Pika posts. One big tweak we made, though, was to limit the length of what we show you. The Pika Pulse is not an endless stream of posts back to the beginning of Pika. It’s a recent, but limited, view. When you reach the end you reach the end. Hug your partner and start making dinner. While we love when folks read your blog posts, we’d prefer not to contribute to providing one more endless stream of words on the internet.
We hope that The Pika Pulse will help folks discover Pika bloggers. We hope those discoveries lead to bookmarking their site, subscribing to their RSS feed, and even having a conversation with them. We want Pika to help build online connections.
So right now The Pika Pulse is pretty simple, and includes a couple of ways to discover Pika bloggers. But The Pulse is just in alpha for the moment and we’ll see what feedback we receive. Thanks for giving it a try!
—Barry
2024-11-26 04:20:06
We are pumped to announce a new layout option for your Pika blog. You can now select Stream of posts as a blog layout option in Settings. This is a whole new layout design alongside our existing launch layout, List of titles.
What you get is a blog that displays your posts in full text, one after another. Like this:
You also have the option to choose an excerpt to display as a limited version of your blog post in your stream of posts. This way you can keep the stream tight with a shorter amount of text and a “Continue reading” link at the bottom of the post excerpt. To define your excerpt, click this toolbar button in the editor:
An excerpt is shown with a handy indicator so you know just which part of your post will display in a stream of posts:
There’s also a Pika variable to insert an excerpt. Simply type {{ excerpt }} ! (And for you folks with WordPress muscle memory, you’re welcome to type <!-- more -->. 😊)
We are super excited for Pika to support a stream layout for your blog. We know there are many folks who prefer this sort of layout for their blogs, and it’s awesome that Pika now better supports those bloggers right out of the box! If you give the stream layout a try, please let us know what you think.
2024-11-20 00:45:53
Since the beginning Pika’s editor has properly processed text written in the Markdown format. Well, Pika’s editor has properly processed almost all text written in the Markdown format. There are a few exceptions that are not quite correct, and today we get to cross out one of those exceptions: Markdown links.
A Markdown link looks like this:
[Kagi Small Web](https://kagi.com/smallweb)And here’s what happens now when you type a Markdown link in Pika!
It’s a small thing, but one more bit of polish to Pika’s already fantastic editor. Enjoy!
2024-10-24 22:58:48
While Pika has offered the ability to set up your site navigation for a long while, many Pika folks were clamoring for a footer for their site. Clamor no longer, Pika peeps!
Pika’s site footer is easily edited on your Settings page. You also have the option to choose whether or not you’d like to include the site footer on your home page.
You can see the site footer in action right down below. 👇👇👇
2024-10-24 02:21:57
Lately we’ve seen a lot of people moving their existing blogs to Pika from other blogging services. It’s been fun to see how folks react to a blog software that isn’t loaded down with things they don’t need. It’s been great to see many folks being reenergized about blogging!
One big challenge to moving your online home to a new location is breaking links to your blog posts. It can feel like an impossible-to-remove blocker when you consider leaving your old place for a new one. We don’t want that fear blocking your move to Pika. We believe that cool URLs don’t die more than anyone!
That’s why today we’re introducing aliases to Pika. Check it out:
Aliases are the best way to tell Pika, “Hey, Pika, this post used to exist over there. If any visitor stops by that spot, can you please escort them over here to where the post is now? Thank you!”
We hope aliases help ease any concerns you have with a move to Pika. What’s left stopping you from pretty easy blogging with Pika? We hope it’s not money, but if it is we have just the thing for you: a coupon code! Use WPCOUPON to get 15% off your first year of Pika Pro. This should help you make the jump from any of the WP-based blogging platforms you may be on today. (Just remember, WPCOUPON expires at the end of October.)