Building Pika Out Loud

Since the beginning Pika’s editor has properly processed text written in the Markdown format. Well, Pika’s editor has properly processed almost all text written in the Markdown format. There are a few exceptions that are not quite correct, and today we get to cross out one of those exceptions: Markdown links.

A Markdown link looks like this:

[Kagi Small Web](https://kagi.com/smallweb)

And here’s what happens now when you type a Markdown link in Pika!

It’s a small thing, but one more bit of polish to Pika’s already fantastic editor. Enjoy!

While Pika has offered the ability to set up your site navigation for a long while, many Pika folks were clamoring for a footer for their site. Clamor no longer, Pika peeps!

Pika’s site footer is easily edited on your Settings page. You also have the option to choose whether or not you’d like to include the site footer on your home page.

You can see the site footer in action right down below. 👇👇👇

Lately we’ve seen a lot of people moving their existing blogs to Pika from other blogging services. It’s been fun to see how folks react to a blog software that isn’t loaded down with things they don’t need. It’s been great to see many folks being reenergized about blogging!

One big challenge to moving your online home to a new location is breaking links to your blog posts. It can feel like an impossible-to-remove blocker when you consider leaving your old place for a new one. We don’t want that fear blocking your move to Pika. We believe that cool URLs don’t die more than anyone!

That’s why today we’re introducing aliases to Pika. Check it out:

Aliases are the best way to tell Pika, “Hey, Pika, this post used to exist over there. If any visitor stops by that spot, can you please escort them over here to where the post is now? Thank you!”

We hope aliases help ease any concerns you have with a move to Pika. What’s left stopping you from pretty easy blogging with Pika? We hope it’s not money, but if it is we have just the thing for you: a coupon code! Use WPCOUPON to get 15% off your first year of Pika Pro. This should help you make the jump from any of the WP-based blogging platforms you may be on today. (Just remember, WPCOUPON expires at the end of October.)

Until today, Pika did not allow you to make an image grid via our editor. To be more precise, if you had very small images you could make a 2-column grid before, but who even knew that? Certainly very few of you!

Now you are able to make a 2-column image grid using any images you please! Here’s a grid via the toolbar:

And here’s a grid via drag-and-drop:

Clever readers may also have noticed that we’ve finally replaced the paperclip toolbar button with a more-accurate camera icon:

One thing to note: If your existing posts happened to have back-to-back images in this “gallery” block, those posts might now be showing your images in this 2-column grid format. Sorry about that! If you’d ever like to detach consecutive images from the grid, move your cursor between the images and hit enter to do so:

Oh, and here are two of my favorite gifs:

In a very recent development, Mastodon’s 4.3 release is rolling out support for author tags. What this will soon allow is for the author of a shared link to be displayed natively alongside the link itself, complete with clickability to the author’s Mastodon profile. This is one more positive step in Mastodon’s verification story; one that is thankfully not a pay-to-play feature ala some other social networks.

Here’s an example of what it’ll look like:

Pika already supports site verification. If you’ve set up site verification, we’re happy to say that your site now also includes the necessary author tag on all of your posts and pages. All that’s left is to set things up in your Mastodon account settings. Here’s more info about how it all works.