Building Pika Out LoudModify

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!

Since launch, Pika has supported automatic YouTube embedding. It’s time to add another automatic embed to the mix: Vimeo. Many folks prefer Vimeo for sharing their creations, and we’re happy that Pika now properly supports another option for video embeds!

In addition to sharing your own videos, Vimeo is a great place to discover short films, animation, and more. Just paste the Vimeo URL (e.g. https://vimeo.com/71474416) from your address bar into Pika. Explore, create, and share!

In the past month we’ve made many an unannounced update to Pika. Check out all the small things that have been happening!

Writing posts:

• Strip dangling, empty <p> tags from posts

• AI threw together this bookmarklet that you can click to go to the edit page for a blog post if you’re reading it on your public site

• Added pagination to the Dashboard, which you’ll only see if you have more than 500 posts

• Improved linking in the flash messages when creating a post or a page

Viewing your site:

• Added some new CSS classes to allow folks to customize their site design at will. You can now find CSS available for: a specific post, page, or tag; post-, page-, or tag-type pages; home page and blog post index pages; and guestbook and new guestbook entry pages.

• Improved the YouTube embed layout on mobile.

Misc & Maintenance:

• Enabled upcoming-renewal notification emails with our billing provider

• Added support for Statcounter analytics

• Bugfix: Improved default titling for titleless posts with only Pika variables or images as content

• Bugfix: Improved spacing of the “Continue reading…” link on blogs with the stream of posts layout

• Bugfix: Take Rhino update to fix a bug where pasting an image led to two images appearing in the editor (this also allowed us to remove our own custom paste-handling code)

• Bugfix: Strip out various language characters for which we don’t currently have transliteration in place from URL generation–these characters were causing problems with alias redirections

• Bugfix: Fix occasional issue with tag page RSS feed links

• Bugfix: Fix issue where a text character sometimes was deleted after attaching an image

• Created a script to migrate blog posts between two blogs

• Improved testing around pasting content into the editor

• Improved testing around using images in the editor

• Updated several libraries we depend on due to security patches

• Ran many imports for bloggers migrating to Pika

Advertising:

• Conduit @ 13:09

• Reconcilable Differences @ 20:57

We are happy to announce that alt text has arrived in Pika!

Alt text is a text description of images and graphics, which you can use to make the images on your site more accessible. The text is read by screen readers to provide information about the image to the reader of your blog. When writing alt text, you should provide both descriptions and context.

It’s a bit of an art form to understand when and how to write alt text. Thankfully the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative has this alt decision tree to help guide you on your way to making the web more accessible.

Here’s how to add alt text to an image in Pika (the example is borrowed from this digital accessibility guide):

Up until this point Pika has been making due by adding the captions you enter for an image to its alt text attribute. We understood that this was not really a correct solution, but we also noticed that many of you made use of this option. 👏 All of those captions will continue to be used as alt text for the images you uploaded in the past. Going forward we will only include alt text if you explicitly add it.

When we released image grids to Pika, one of Pika’s shortcomings came into, well, focus: there was no interface to quickly get a closer look at images posted with Pika! While the image grid allows you to lay out your images a little more succinctly, readers definitely want to get a closer look at the interesting images you’ve shared. Now Pika has got you covered with built-in image lightbox for all of your posts and pages.

Give it a try by clicking or tapping on any of the images below. Enjoy!