Building Pika Out LoudModify

They say it’s the year of the horse, but over here at Good Enough, it’s going to be the year of the dog(food). Did you know we have a company blog? Did you know that, before this week, it was not hosted on Pika? I know! Well, we took this holiday break to rectify that: https://goodenough.us/

While moving things over, we ended up wanting to make a few specific design customizations. Our philosophy with Pika is that you should be writing, not fiddling, which is why it’s designed so well right out of the box. However, we understand the desire to fiddle, which is why Pika also allows you to add Custom CSS to your blog (at the bottom of Settings > Theme).

If you write Custom CSS for Pika, you’ll be happy to hear we now offer a full-fledged code editor! It includes features like autocompletion, auto-indentation, tabbing without leaving the editor, syntax highlighting, etc — everything you come to expect when writing CSS code.

We don’t necessarily hope this update encourages you to fiddle more, but if you were going to fiddle anyway, we hope the experience is much nicer. And for those of you who have customized your Pika blogs, we hope you share your code with others (that’d make for a good blog post, eh?).

Leading into the holidays we wanted to share a number of updates that have hit Pika without yet registering on the blog. We’ve cleaned a lot unnecessary code out of your published Pika sites while also improving responsive design and accessibility. We’ve also made a number of updates to the software running Pika itself as well as improving a fair bit of the code we look at day-to-day.

Writing posts:

• Cmd-K/Ctrl-K now opens the link toolbar item on Firefox

• Improve editor paste handling for pastes from Apple Notes and Google Docs

Viewing your site:

• Greatly reduced the amount of JavaScript files referenced and loaded on published sites

• Unified embed styling across all supported embeds

• Added titles to iframe embeds for improved accessibility

• Optimized font loading

• Added Catalan translations

• Always use “about this blog” for HTML meta description tags, whether you have a custom home page or not

• Several improvements to the image lightbox, in addition to adding navigation:

  • Made images responsive in real time to changing browser size

  • Improved image centering when a scrollbar is present

  • Refined handling when vertically-swiping a lightbox image

Misc & Maintenance:

• Added ability to edit external navigation link text

• Improved the experience of entering Custom CSS

• Built some improved tools to moderate accounts when they run afoul of the Pika Rules

• Updated to the latest version of Rails

• Unified error page styling

• Moved to a new system for processing server logs

Earlier this year Pika added easy automatic embed support for Spotify and Apple Music links. That included support for podcasts hosted on Spotify, but not Apple Podcasts, which is a different service than Apple Music. Today, we close that gap by adding embed support for Apple Podcasts!

Here’s one Barry recently enjoyed:

Like all Pika embeds, just copy→paste any Apple Podcast URL (e.g. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-eyes/id1494539046) into the Pika editor and we’ll take care of the rest.

Soon after releasing the image lightbox feature in Pika we were asked to add navigation arrows to the lightbox so someone could browse through all of the images in a given blog post without having to click on each one. Guess what? It’s Friday, it’s here, and it’s pretty cool!

Try it for yourself by clicking or tapping an image below and then navigating all of the images on this post with the arrow buttons, your keyboard arrow keys, or a swipe of your finger:

Images courtesy of Public Domain Image Archive.

While services like Spotify and Apple Music dominate the music streaming landscape, there are many players out there. Lots of folks like Tidal for its sound quality and artist support. Many people have access to Amazon Music as part of their Prime accounts.

All of that is to say that it is high time for Pika to support Tidal and Amazon Music embeds!

Enjoy!

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: