Building Pika Out LoudModify

We’re happy to announce that Pika now has an API!

When choosing how to implement an API for posting and updating blog posts, it became quickly apparent that supporting the Micropub standard was the way to go:

• Micropub is an open standard API for creating and updating posts on websites

• Micropub is supported by many third-party clients

This open standard with third-party client support means that Pika’s posting API should work consistently with what you might already be used to with other platforms. For those of you making use of third-party services or the API, this means it should be easier to move between Pika and other blogging services that support a Micropub API. Of course it should now also be easier to move your personal blogging process from one of those services to Pika. 😊

Along with launching the Micropub API, we are also happy to share that Pika now supports iA Writer and Drafts. Visit those links to find instructions for using these excellent writing tools to create draft posts on Pika. We anticipate adding a few more third-party apps to the mix soon!

For more reading on the API itself, visit our documentation. Note that this first version of the API is a minimal one. For instance, there is no deletion or post list endpoints at this time. If you feel a strong need for these or other features, please let us know. We’d love to hear what you’re planning to build.

Are you using Pika’s Guestbook feature? Isn’t it great?! Go sign our guestbook, we’ll wait…

Today we’re adding a few bits of functionality to make managing your guestbook signings a bit more streamlined.

First is the ability to Hide unapproved signings. Sometimes there’s a signing you’re not ready to approve, but you also don’t want to delete. For these cases, you can now hide the signing.

Second is the ability to Filter your signings in the dashboard. This is useful for when you want to review hidden signings, or haven’t checked in awhile and have a bunch of new signings to approve.

As a reminder, Guestbooks are available to everybody in Pika, no Pro subscription required! If you haven’t yet, you can turn it on in Settings > Labs.

In Pika when you add a page to your site’s navigation, we use the page’s title as the label in the navigation. Pretty simple, but sometimes that’s not what you want.

Now you can set a custom label for pages in your site navigation. Once a site has been added to your navigation in Dashboard > Pages, open its ••• menu and you’ll see a new Custom label for navigation option that leads to this form:

As an example, the page here on Building Pika Out Loud with our contact form is titled Get in touch but now labeled in the navigation above just Contact — exactly how we like it!

Note that this option is also available for non-standard pages like a custom Home page, your Guestbook, and even the default Blog page.

This is just a quick update! All the meta settings you could edit for a post or page (like publish date or custom css) were previously found in a ••• menu in the top-right of the editor. You used to have to click that, and then select the setting you wanted to change, one-at-a-time.

Now all those options can be found with one-click of a new Settings button. This replaces that ••• menu entirely. The benefits here are (1) less clicks and (2) more discoverability.

Happy blogging!

Emojis. Emojis! EMOJIS!!

Almost everyone likes to throw an emoji into their writing. Admittedly, blog posting isn’t texting when it comes to emoji-per-character ratio, but emojis still have a place. And now they have an even better place in your Pika editor!

If you have familiarity with Slack, Discord, and the like, you already have the muscle memory to quickly write emojis and now you can make use of that skill in Pika. Type ‘:’ and you will now get emoji autocompletion just like your chat apps:

Please, go forth and emoji responsibly!

Today in Pika we’re excited to announce that we finally support a feature that has been part of the web since the early 90’s: the ability to link an image to another url on the internet!

When you add an image to a post or page, you’ll see the old Alt button is now an “Alt / Link” button. Clicking it will open a new dialog to add either Alt text and/or a Link for this image. Here’s what that looks like:

The Pika editor will let you know if your image has alt text or a link with a ✓ in the button. As a reminder, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative offers an alt decision tree to help guide you on making your images more accessible.

We want the above gif to be zoomable, so here’s a different image that links elsewhere as an example:

Note that when an image has a link, clicking it won’t zoom into the image. However, that image will still appear in the overall image carousel if you start from a different image on the page and navigate over to it.

We hope you enjoy this classic feature of the web here in 2026.