Building Pika Out LoudModify

Replying by email is a feature that I added to my blog in the time before it was hosted at Pika. Comments on a blog can be nice, but they invariably come with the baggage of managing moderation or spam. Social media is another way to talk with others about your blog posts, but that format has its downsides as well. I’m sure by now we’re all aware of those trade-offs!

When I added a reply by email link on the bottom of my blog, I started to receive occasional messages from folks who I never realized were reading my blog. It turned out to be a really nice experience! Some emails were short notes of thanks or encouragement. Some emails were longer messages with discussion about my writing and their related experiences. I especially enjoyed the latter emails, which led to ongoing threads of one-on-one discussion. These conversations led me to having new thoughts about the topic and to me making a connection with another person somewhere out there in the world. These conversations reminded me of the hope and positivity I had for the internet thirty years ago when I first started spending time online.

With that background, I’m happy to announce the addition of reply by email to Pika! Visit Settings > Labs to turn on the feature. Then enter either your email address or your Letterbird username and you’ll see a new “Reply by email” link at the bottom of each of your blog posts:

Oh, and if you enjoy a blog post and you see a reply by email link on that blog, you should reply to it. It’s these conversations that help move the needle on making the online world a more positive, uplifting place. People love a friendly note!

Let us know how you like the new reply by email feature by, well, replying to this post by email! 👇

—Barry

I bet when some of you read about Pika’s new Spotify embed feature you were wondering if Apple Music would work as well? Sorry, it didn’t work…that is until it did! Apple Music embedding is now supported in Pika. Yay!

Once again, grab a link to an album, artist, song, or playlist that you wish to share, and paste it into Pika’s editor. 🎶 Rock out! 🎶

Pika has supported easy YouTube embedding from the beginning–simply paste a YouTube link and the magic happens. We recently added Vimeo embed, and now it’s time to get into the music with Spotify embedding.

It’s simple! Just grab the link to the album, artist, song, podcast, or playlist you wish to share, and paste it into Pika’s editor. 🎶 Ta-da! 🎶

It’s Friday. Time for you to share those weekend playlists!

Blogging has long had a cross-over with programming education. Before Stack Overflow existed, searching the internet for answers to your technical questions would (sometimes) lead you to blog post with an answer. Often, when I (Barry) solved a challenging problem in my code, I would blog about it in hopes of helping the next person who ran into the same issue. (This also led to numerous experiences of me searching for an error message and finding…my own blog post from years earlier about the subject. 😆)

It is important for Pika to support blogging about code, and I’m happy to say that Pika now includes the ability to have syntax highlighting in your code blocks! If you click the code block button in the toolbar (or type the Markdown ``` shortcut), you will get the same ol’ code block you’re used to in Pika:

But now in the Pika editor you can select a programming language to trigger a new design, complete with syntax highlighting:

Pika also supports Markdown hints, like ```ruby. If you use that Markdown hint, Pika will auto-select Ruby as your code language for the code block. Beautiful!

alias_method :real_now, :now
def now
  real_now - testing_offset
end
alias_method :new, :now

The languages Pika currently supports are:

• Bash

• C#

• CSS

• Diff

• Go

• HTML

• Java

• JavaScript

• JSON

• Markdown

• PHP

• Plain text

• PowerShell

• Python

• Ruby

• Rust

• SQL

• Swift

• TypeScript

• XML

• YAML

If you write a lot about a different language, please let us know what it is and we’ll see if we can add support.

Please note that any existing blog posts with code blocks will not be formatted with syntax highlighting retroactively. You can add syntax highlighting by editing those posts.

In the past month, Pika work has been a bit lighter. We are unsurprisingly focused on Jelly of late, and also life sometimes pulls us away from Pika productivity. Still, several smaller things happened! (Always keep an eye on the blog for our bigger announcements.)

Writing posts:

• Added automatic audio embed when pasting an MP3 URL

Viewing your site:

• Made tag design on posts more consistent

• Improved video embed design

• Improved image design when captions get long

Misc & Maintenance:

• Put together a Bear Blog import script

• Fixed up automatic Vimeo embedding for certain link types

• Improved some help center pages

• Resolved several N+1 problems

• Applied security updates to code libraries that we depend on

Personal bloggers land in one of these two camps:

1. “I want all links to open in the same window”

2. “I want any links that leave my site to open in a new tab”

Pika has forced all of its bloggers to live in the first camp, but it’s high time Pika also supported the second camp. Visit Settings and click on Open links to other sites in a new tab to make all external links on your site open in a new tab.

Give it a try and let us know if you see any issues!