Building Pika Out LoudModify

Almost daily we get an email with someone asking how they can find other bloggers who are writing with Pika. In those messages many mourn the loss of The Pika Pulse. We do too.

After much thinking about how to do it responsibly, and teasing it in recent months, today I can tell you officially: The Pika Pulse is coming back!

Why Pulse, again?

When we first set out to build Pika, one of our primary goals was to help people build connections. Here’s my writing to the team about that topic way back in December of 2023:

I live in a relatively rural area. There are not many people here that have an interest in these internet and web programming things that I'm interested in. Fifteen-years-ago me would travel 75 minutes one way to go to user group meetings and events to congregate with these folks. Maintaining a personal website and blogging is a way for me to connect with similar folks from all across the world without leaving home.

Sure, it can be done on social, but blogging feels more serious and considered. This matches a temperament that I enjoy and fulfills a personal need. In my 28 years of adulthood I have not found a better way for me to fulfill this need.

Connection is one of the biggest reasons that I blog, and I bet that’s a big reason for a lot of Pika customers as well. I’m also generally blog-curious: How are other people designing their blog? What are they blogging about?

I think The Pika Pulse will be a fantastic way to discover bloggers using Pika, to start building connections with them through blogging, and to be inspired for your own blogging.

What’s new?

For those of you unfamiliar with the original Pulse, the rough idea was a general feed of the latest posts written on Pika, depicted in their Pika theme. There was no upvoting or trending posts. That vibe is mostly retained in the upcoming Pulse, with these updates:

• Pulse will now have two feeds:

  • The “Recent” feed will be similar to the old Pulse. This will be where you can go to discover Pika bloggers. You’ll also be able to mute blogs from this feed to tailor it to your own tastes and interests.

  • The “Following” feed will be a stream of posts from Pika bloggers you choose to follow on Pulse. See the following paragraph (pun intended).

• Pulse will now incorporate user-created Custom CSS to do an even better job of displaying posts in a blogger’s unique style and theme.

• Pika now has codified Pika Rules all Pika blogs must follow, which we’ve consistently improved since we last shut down Pulse. You should read them if you haven’t in awhile.

• We now have internal tooling to help our team better prevent or remove spam and unsavory posts from the Recent feed (and from Pika in general).

Following a Pika blogger on Pulse will be a new feature for Pika users. This isn’t meant to replace subscribing via RSS — we love RSS! The Following feed will be another option to keep up with new posts from your favorite Pika blogs. It’s less like an RSS inbox and more like browsing the blogs you follow in one place, with each blog keeping the visual character that the blogger intended. We think it’s a unique alternative to see what your favorite Pika blogs have written recently. Check in at your leisure.

Between following and muting to make Pulse your own, and with our rules and internal tooling in place, we think this is a much better version of our original vision for discovery and connection on Pika.

What’s next?

The Pika Pulse will be back in a matter of weeks, not months.

Notably, on launch not all Pika blogs will be in the Recent feed — only the blogs we manually approve for Pulse will show up there, and we’re intentionally taking it slow in approving blogs for Pulse. We’re not trying to create a curated feed so much as trying to be mindful of creating a new space that adheres to our Pika Rules and feels welcoming for new bloggers. If you’re not there at launch and think you should be, give it time.

Since it’s been awhile, you should check your Site Visibility settings. If you’d like your blog to be considered for Pulse, make sure to check Settings > It’s OK if my site or posts show up in The Pika Pulse. If you’d rather not share your blog in Pulse, make sure to uncheck this setting.¹

An experiment for Pika

We’re excited, but also admittedly a little nervous, to flip the switch and turn on The Pika Pulse again. There are just two of us here at Good Enough, and our small team’s primary goal for Pika is making the best software for anyone to write on the internet at their own domain. Our goal is not necessarily to create or moderate public spaces, nor to manage a moderation team.

So while we’re being cautiously optimistic about this second go at Pulse, we’re also going to treat it like an experiment — one we might need to tweak over time, possibly overhaul, or pivot, or if need be again, end. Your feedback during this experiment will be welcomed.

That all said, we’ve been using a version of Pulse ourselves for a few weeks now and it feels so good to be back! We think that you’ll be as excited as we have been to peruse it and discover new blogs. Let’s see how it goes!

~Barry

1. This Site Visibility setting only affects the Recent feed in Pulse. Following is modeled after RSS, so any blog on Pika that isn’t password-protected can be followed and seen in the Following feed.

There are many blogs that would like to live in a dual state of being mostly public, but occasionally private. Someone could be:

• Writing occasional personal posts that they only want to share with family and friends

• Writing a post in private that they might choose to share later

• Wanting to share a post with a friend before publishing to the world

• Wanting to offer members-only content that’s only visible to a small group

We have enhanced Pika to now have the ability to support a public blog with occasional password-protected posts and pages. To set it up, visit Settings > Labs and turn on Password-protected blog, set your password, and select Password-protect only specific posts and pages of my choosing.

At this point no posts or pages on your site will be password protected. When writing a new post that you’d like to keep private, open ⚙ Settings and select Lock this post behind my site password. (Note that all password-protected posts will be excluded from any future discovery contexts. Also note that selectively password-protected posts on a public site cannot be sent as a newsletter.)

Here’s a password-protected post in action. Just enter the password “whatasecret” to see it.

For those that need it, we hope this new way of selectively hiding certain posts and pages in Pika is useful. Please let us know how you like it.

Hyperlinks are a fundamental building block of the hypertext web, and often a fundamental part of both blogging and personal websites. Today we’ve made creating and editing links better in Pika!

Now you can more easily find and link to your other posts and pages right from the link dialog. We’ve added our dashboard search here, so you can just type and find what you want to link to without leaving that tab. This is especially useful for longtime bloggers with many old posts, as well as blogging on mobile where jumping between tabs is a bit of a hassle.

Additionally, if you move your editor cursor inside a link, Pika will show you a preview of where that link goes. This is especially useful if you want to double-check all your links are correct before publishing.

We hope these features make it easier for you to blog on the web. Enjoy!

We love Bandcamp and what they do for artists, fans, and the independent music scene as a whole. Indie web 🤝 Indie music. We made sure to support Bandcamp back when we built Album Whale, and today we’re excited to announce Bandcamp embed support in Pika!

To celebrate, here’s their Album of the Day for today, a bubbly celebration of Japanese synth:

Like all our embed support, no need to grab the embed code — just paste a link to an album or track on Bandcamp into Pika and we’ll do the rest. Unlike our other embeds, Bandcamp takes an extra server roundtrip, so you’ll see a message when the embed takes a moment to show up.

Enjoy!

Almost two months ago we shipped Dashboard Search, allowing you to easily find where you wrote about [enter thing here] right from your dashboard. Today, we’re excited to offer that same search functionality for your posts right on your site!

Not everyone wants their readers to search through years of old blog posts, so we’ve built this as an opt-in feature. You can turn it on from Settings > Labs > Site Search. This will do two things:

1. Create a standard “Search” page, which you can choose to add to your nav in Dashboard > Pages if you’d like.

2. Give you access to the {{ search_form }} Pika Variable, so you can add the search form wherever you’d like on your site. For example, here on Building Pika Out Loud we’ve opted to create an Archive page with the search form at the top.

For this first version of Site Search, we took the exact same simple approach as we did for Dashboard Search: there’s no operators or partial-text support or anything like that. Your readers can search your posts across title, body, and tags, and it’s pretty performant. Enjoy! 🕵‍♀️

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.