Building Pika Out LoudModify

If you’ve been following along here, you’ll know we’ve been in tag-land recently. For our tag-loving Pika peeps, we’ve got something else for you: Now you can see a post’s tags right in the dashboard!

You can toggle this display from the new “Show/hide tags” option at the bottom of the tag filter dropdown:

Hot on the heels of Filters Posts by Tag, we’ve now added a dedicated section of the Dashboard to manage all of your tags!

At the bottom of the tag filter dropdown, you’ll see a new link to “Edit tags” which will take you to a place where you can do just that. The only thing about tags you can edit is the name, and doing so will update the tag on all of your posts. Perhaps there will be more functionality here in the future, but only time will tell…

Here at Pika we’re always trying to smooth the corners and help you avoid any small scrapes or bruises as you set about writing blog posts. In particular, we’ve put out a couple of updates that really make the menu system more useful and informative. We’ve also continued improving Pika’s newsletter offering. All that and more!

Writing posts:

• Added a bubble menu to make it quicker to format or link selected text

• Improved which toolbar items are enabled/disabled for given blocks of text

• Updated the editor to show your tags if they exist when editing a post

• Add posts Pika variable option to sort by title rather than date (see manual)

• Added capability to paste simply-formatted text into image captions

• Added ability to hide subscriber list in newsletter section

• Improved pasting capabilities in image captions

• Added a button to dismiss flash informational messages

Viewing your site:

• Added Latvian language support

• Improved layout of image galleries in newsletter emails

• Brought syntax highlight to code sent in newsletter emails

• Improved rendering of the newsletter subscription form

• Fixed a bug where social share summaries could include an image caption

Misc & Maintenance:

• Fixed a bug with horizontal scrolling of the mobile editor’s toolbar

• Fixed a bug with the image zoom cursor

• Improved some translations for built-in navigation items

• Improved lots of HTML markup

• Updated to latest Rhino editor version

• Security updates to supporting code libraries

We have a short-and-simple update for you to start this week! If you use tags in Pika, now you can filter your Posts dashboard by tag:

Exporting your Pika blog has been a support-based process in the past. You would email us, we would generate an export, and then we’d send it to you via email. While it worked, it was a time-consuming process. And we know that for some people having to send that email to ask for an export may have put them off getting an export at all.

The good news is that now you can generate your own exports without having to write us! Scroll down to the bottom of your Settings page and you’ll see a new link to Export your posts and pages. Click on through and you’ll find the option to export in the following formats: CSV, JSON, or XML. You may run an export once per day, and they’ll remain downloadable for 14 days before being automatically deleted from our servers.

So if you like to occasionally download your blog posts for storage on your home computer, now you can do that whenever you please. (Well, whenever you please, once per day. 🙂) If you ever decide Pika is no longer the right fit for you, these export formats should allow you to import your Pika posts and pages into many of the other blogging software options on the market.

And for those of you considering Pika for your blog, we can handle importing from those other software options as well! That’s still a manual process, so drop us a line if you’d like to make the move.

We don’t know about you, but we’re quite enjoying this simple blogging platform that’s home to so many bloggers writing about all sorts of things: video games, coffee, engineering, photography, finance, school, work, hardship, life… 

As this platform grows and welcomes ever more bloggers, it's important that our Pika Rules we established earlier this year are contributing to an environment that makes a wide range of people want to blog on Pika. We found some room for improvement.

The updates we made this month to our Pika Rules include:

• Clarified that conduct on Pika, in addition to content, may also be grounds for suspension or removal

• Added a rule about threatening or promoting violence against others

• Added a rule about violating the privacy or personal safety of others

• Added a note about Good Enough’s “Use Restrictions Policy”

• Added when these rules were last updated

Please read our Pika Rules in full here, which include how to report a violation, or appeal a suspension or removal. In the coming months, we also plan to test some internal systems to help us be a bit more proactive in moderating offending blogs and content.