Building Pika Out LoudModify

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!

Emojis. Emojis! EMOJIS!!

Almost everyone likes to throw an emoji into their writing. Admittedly, blog posting isn’t texting when it comes to emoji-per-character ratio, but emojis still have a place. And now they have an even better place in your Pika editor!

If you have familiarity with Slack, Discord, and the like, you already have the muscle memory to quickly write emojis and now you can make use of that skill in Pika. Type ‘:’ and you will now get emoji autocompletion just like your chat apps:

Please, go forth and emoji responsibly!

Today in Pika we’re excited to announce that we finally support a feature that has been part of the web since the early 90’s: the ability to link an image to another url on the internet!

When you add an image to a post or page, you’ll see the old Alt button is now an “Alt / Link” button. Clicking it will open a new dialog to add either Alt text and/or a Link for this image. Here’s what that looks like:

The Pika editor will let you know if your image has alt text or a link with a ✓ in the button. As a reminder, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative offers an alt decision tree to help guide you on making your images more accessible.

We want the above gif to be zoomable, so here’s a different image that links elsewhere as an example:

Note that when an image has a link, clicking it won’t zoom into the image. However, that image will still appear in the overall image carousel if you start from a different image on the page and navigate over to it.

We hope you enjoy this classic feature of the web here in 2026.

1. A New Pika Variable
2. Why Table of Contents?
3. How Does It Work?
   1. Step 1
   2. Step 2
   3. Step 3
4. In Conclusion

A New Pika Variable

Pika now supports a new Pika Variable: {{ table_of_contents }}

Simply add this to your post or page (not as inline code like we did here) and it should render exactly what you expect.

Why Table of Contents?

If you’re not sure why you’d use this, then you probably wouldn’t. Pika is home to all sorts of writers and writing — short-form, long-form, journaling, prose, poetry, news, photography, etc… it makes you wonder “What is a blog anyway?” 🤔

One form of writing on Pika we didn’t anticipate is wiki-style. Some Pika sites include guides to games, or a simple help center for software, or other long-form informational documentation with lots of headers. For these Pika Peeps, a TOC can often be extremely handy to their readers.

How Does It Work?

Step 1

Add {{ table_of_contents }} (not as inline code) to your post or page.

Note: Whenever using a Pika Variable, it won’t work if its marked as code. We have to write it in inline code here in this announcement post so it won’t render 😅 Don’t do exactly what we did here.

Step 2

Save the post or page.

Step 3

When you view the post or page, Pika will output an ordered list with all the headers in said post or page, and links to those sections. We did that here at the top of this post, so you can see what it looks like up above.

In Conclusion

We only added headers to this post for fun to demonstrate the new variable. It honestly doesn’t need such a long announcement post. To the few writers that will use this variable, enjoy!

Update: We’ve since added a couple of additional optional parameters to this new Pika variable.

While our design philosophy for Pika is that you should be writing, not fiddling, we know the siren song of tinkering can be rather strong (yes, we hear it too).

Maybe you have a creative idea for a specific post or page and need some extra customization only there, but achieving that with Pika’s site-wide Custom CSS is a bit tedious. Well as of today you can now additionally add Custom CSS directly to a specific post and page:

You can see this new ability in action on this very post, where we have a unique background color, font, and cursor. If you leave this post, you’ll notice those styles aren’t anywhere else on this blog (notably, also not where this post is shown in a stream of posts — that can get a bit messy with variables).

We look forward to seeing what this unlocks for Pika’s advanced fiddlers!