Building Pika Out LoudModify

As hinted over a month ago on our socials, we’ve been working on a simple newsletter feature for Pika. It’s taken a little longer than we would have liked, in part due to vacations, in part due to “it always takes longer,” and in part due to the perils of HTML-styling for email clients. 🐶

The newsletter beta is available now (!) for anyone who would like to give it a try. Since the newsletter feature is a Pro-only feature, the beta will also require you to be a Pro to give it a try. If you’re on the fence about Pika Pro, please don’t worry about signing up for a month of Pika Pro to give the newsletter feature a try. If it turns out Pika’s not quite right for your needs, we’ll be happy to refund you.

We’ve put up a page in our help center to answer most of the questions you might have about the Pika newsletter feature, but don’t hesitate to reach out if you have more questions! And if you’d like to try the beta, let us know!

We love to make it easy to take a multimedia link from the web and embed it into your Pika blog posts. While us internet veterans get the concept of sharing via embed code, most people online understand links and that’s about it. With Pika, we hope every person is able to write blog posts that share videos, music, and more in interesting and appealing ways.

The first of our new embed options is SoundCloud, a streaming service that has lots of music that can’t be found on, or doesn’t get surfaced by, any of the major music streaming platforms. It’s great for discovery!

And a second new embed option is Mixcloud. Mixcloud is an awesome streaming service for DJs to share their sets with the world. Here’s a great one from friend-of-Pika, DJ Deep Answer:

We have spent a fair bit of time recently working on the upcoming email newsletter feature. In the midst of that work, background images were added to Pika themes! And a few other things got accomplished as well…

• Times New Roman is now available as a font theme

• GoatCounter analytics support

• TelemetryDeck analytics support

• Umami analytics should now also work with Umami’s EU-hosted servers

• Created a Ghost import script

• Fix text selection bug in the editor via an upgrade to one of our dependencies

• 💪 Rails upgrade 💪

The 90’s called and demanded that Pika should make it easier to add background images to your blog. Who are we to deny The 90’s?

Simply visit Settings > Theme, select a custom color theme, and upload your tiny image. We’ll tile that image as the background of your site.

Where do you get these tile-able images? We recommend browsing this vast archive. And bonus: We’ve added Times New Roman as a font theme option, so you can really lean in.

And to help you get to really blogging like it’s The 90’s (only better), we’ve got a limited-time offer for 15% off your first year of Pika Pro. Just use coupon code PIKACITIES at checkout. Hurry, though, because the offer ends on June 13th.

As we continued to be very focused on Jelly this spring, Pika tweaks have been a light. Yet still things continue to be improved!

Writing posts:

• Added Swift and C# support to syntax highlighting

Viewing your site:

• Added support for Clicky analytics

Misc & Maintenance:

• Fixed up several syntax highlighting bugs

• Fixed an analytics settings bug

• Fixed several bugs around pagination

• Fixed a bug where slug creation was attempting to include special characters

• Fixed a non-user-impacting bug in our image storage stack

• Applied several security updates to code libraries that we depend on

Behind the Curtain is an occasional series highlighting updates to Pika that do not warrant their own feature blog post.

Sometimes when you write a longer blog post, it’s handy to add headings to subsections of your writing. Sometimes when posts get long, you’d like to link directly to those headings. This can be useful for sharing a section of a post with a friend, or for creating a table of contents at the top of a longer post.

You can find a link to a heading by hovering or focusing on the heading itself. Here it is in action:

Here’s a heading for you to test!

A couple of details about this feature as it exists right now:

• Linkable headings are not retroactive in Pika. If you want a post to have linkable headings you will need to edit and re-save your post.

• Above there is a gif showing how to find a heading link in a desktop browser. There is no similar interface on mobile at this time.

We hope this is a useful update to Pika for those who like to write longer blog posts, or informational blog posts with a table of contents.