2025-01-30 00:47:36
When we turned on The Pika Pulse we thought it would be a fun way for people to discover some of the great writing being done on Pika each and every day. Our hope was that we could take a relatively low effort approach by randomly selecting posts written on a given day, and that we could avoid spending our days maintaining a list of “staff picks” or something of that nature.
We had not fully considered that whatever appeared in The Pulse would feel promoted or endorsed by us. In hindsight, we totally understand why people would feel that that might be, or expect that someone behind the scenes had read every post and signed off on them. To be honest, it was naive of us to expect people to think anything else!
We’re a small team and we want the bulk of our time and energy to be spent building the best software we can. It’s not possible for us to read everything on The Pulse and ensure it’s suitable to promote to a larger audience. It was a mistake to launch something that deserves to be moderated.
We still hope to help Pika authors be discovered and we’ll continue to noodle on ideas to enable discovery. For now, though, we’re moving our focus back to building the best online writing experience possible!
As part of our Pulse discussion this week, we’ve also been talking about what kind of content is allowed on Pika more generally, and when we might take the step of shutting a blog down. We’ve added some guidelines to our help docs, but we’ll share them here as well.
Blogging is a place where you should be able to write your thoughts and feelings without fear of censorship, but we do have some rules. We reserve the right to remove a blog for any reason, but we will most definitely remove blogs that contain:
Hate speech–there’s no room on Pika’s servers for folks who call the human rights of any person or group into question
Content that is discriminatory or meant to harass a person or group
Content that is illegal or promotes illegal activity
Attempts to distribute malware
Spam
Additionally, Pika users are subject to our use restrictions policy.
On Friday we will be taking down The Pika Pulse. To enable others to discover your favorite Pika blogs, we recommend you submit them to any and all of the following discovery tools:
2025-01-16 06:35:01
This here blog has never really functioned as a Pika changelog. We haven’t written about bug fixes or advertising efforts or any of that. To this point the blog has been more for feature announcements, along with occasional thoughts about blogging in general.
We realized that this means Building Pika Out Loud has not really been telling the whole story out loud at all! Most weeks all sorts of work is happening behind the scenes to streamline existing features, shore up experiences, and fix bugs. We’re not going to write a post every time we update Pika, but from time-to-time we’ll be writing one of these “Behind the Curtain” posts to give you an idea what all else has been happening here in Pika land.
When it comes to writing posts, we’ve:
Added links in the flash messages so you can edit your newly saved post–for those times when you realized a mistake just after posting
Added the ability to clear an alias
When it comes to viewing your site, we’ve:
Adjusted Pro accounts with custom domains so any hits to their old subdomain.pika.page URL will redirect to the proper page at their custom domain
Fixed a bug on hyperlink text wrapping for post excerpts (on sites with a Stream of posts layout)
Fixed a bug where search engines and feed readers were sometimes showing a Pika logo next to your blog instead of your custom avatar
We’ve been improving The Pika Pulse:
SVG-ified the Pulse logo
Numerous feed tweaks you’ll read below…
We’ve been improving the Atom feeds:
Added a 5-minute delay to your feeds to give you time to correct any mistakes
Made the Pulse feed a 24-hour delay, which (hopefully) allows us time to kick out any untoward posts from The Pulse before it’s distributed to the world
Fixed a bug in feeds that could sometimes lead to feed readers picking up duplicate posts
Fixed a bug for titleless posts that included only images–Atom feeds require a title, and now that title is “untitled” instead of “[image1.jpg]”
Tidied up author attribution on the Pulse feed
Limited the Pulse feed to only include excerpts so that readers are encouraged to visit your cool Pika site
Fixed a bug where empty paragraphs at the end of posts were bleeding into feeds–some feed readers don’t play nice with empty paragraphs
We’ve been improving Pika in general:
Upgraded our caching library
Improved our caching logic so we hit caches more often (speed!)
Improved our caching configuration to better refine how long we cache page information
Fixed a bug in our Google HTML tag verification logic (used for sitemap submission)
We’ve been advertising. Maybe you heard about us at:
2025-01-15 06:19:32
If you follow along at all with The Pika Pulse, you know that Pika bloggers hail from all around the world. While we aren’t here to announce full internationalization support, today we’re taking a positive step forward in offering a new setting: custom date formats. Here are the options:
These date formats will be reflected all over your site, from the dates in the list of posts on your homepage to the date in your post footer to the dates rendered by Pika variables. We hope this goes a ways to help many of you feel more at home on Pika. And please, as always, let us know if we missed something!
2025-01-14 06:03:15
Online or off, social events are always much more fun before the jerks show up. In the last year we’ve seen the jerks overrun two of the internet’s social spaces. They’ve brought down Twitter, they’re bringing down Threads, and they’ll probably bring down the next new social network. That’s why I prefer to write in a place where I control my domain. For me that’s using Pika to maintain my blog and website.
(Maybe it’s time for you to start writing at your own space on Pika? Give it a try, and if you like it you can use coupon code ZUCKINHELL for 15% off your first year of Pika Pro. Fair warning, this coupon will expire at the end of January.)
Social networks can be fun while they last. I’ve certainly enjoyed conversing with people I’ve met at conferences, past jobs, etc. In the rare case there are even nice interactions with people you admire. I know I’ve gotten a spark from a few of those surprising conversations.
But it’s only temporary. People come and go from the networks and unfortunately those friendly folks are often supplanted with a-holes. A communication system that is designed for such succinctness attracts the most cynical of hot-takers. And when the networks are run by unfathomably-rich megalomaniacs, it’s inevitable that they will be warped into something with which a vast majority of us don’t want to be associated.
Come to Pika, set your site to a stream of posts layout, and you’ve made your own page on the internet that is effectively a social network of one. Share your thoughts, short or long. Though your Pika site is a social network of one, that doesn’t mean you’re alone. There are countless people out there just like you, blogging in their own space. Quote their posts or send them an email about what they’ve written. Now that is real communication
(Give Pika a try. If you like it, keep blogging! If you love it, use the ZUCKINHELL coupon by January 31st to get 15% off your first year of Pika Pro.)
~Barry
2025-01-09 05:58:57
Today we have added a feature that no one has asked for, but that we think will be very useful to folks who are new to blogging. Pika prompts are, well, writing prompts. When you feel like blogging, but just aren’t sure what to write, Pika prompts will be there to helpfully offer some writing suggestions.
We’ve gathered 100s of prompts from around the web and we’re giving you a quick way to access these prompts without having to do your own search. Just hop into the three-dots menu when writing a new post to ask for a prompt. To wit:
Hopefully Pika prompts will help with writer’s block for both new and seasoned writers alike. If you have a pile of your own writing prompts that you wish to share, please do get in touch. Be sure to include a name and link you’d like us to use for attribution!
2025-01-04 01:51:42
[January 29, 2025: We’ve decided to shut down The Pika Pulse.]
Recently we released The Pika Pulse and it’s been wonderful for Pika folks to see blog posts streaming out from their fellow Pika peeps. The one restriction to start this Alpha period was that you had to be logged in to Pika to see the Pulse. Immediately folks wondered when we could get this Pulse thing made public. Well, today’s the day…
The Public Pika Pulse is here!
If you scroll to the bottom of The Pulse you will also see a link to an RSS feed. This was another in-demand feature, but we’ve put it out there with a caveat: the feed is delayed by 24 hours. Why? Because things slip into The Pulse. Most of these posts are not bad (🤞), but they aren’t necessary. We will generally find these test posts and get them clipped out within a day. On weekends we’re not so vigilant, so some junk will probably sneak into the feed from time to time. Sorry in advance. 😬🙏
Give The Pika Pulse a look and let us know if you have any thoughts about it!