Building Pika Out LoudModify

Here at Pika we’re always trying to smooth the corners and help you avoid any small scrapes or bruises as you set about writing blog posts. In particular, we’ve put out a couple of updates that really make the menu system more useful and informative. We’ve also continued improving Pika’s newsletter offering. All that and more!

Writing posts:

• Added a bubble menu to make it quicker to format or link selected text

• Improved which toolbar items are enabled/disabled for given blocks of text

• Updated the editor to show your tags if they exist when editing a post

• Add posts Pika variable option to sort by title rather than date (see manual)

• Added capability to paste simply-formatted text into image captions

• Added ability to hide subscriber list in newsletter section

• Improved pasting capabilities in image captions

• Added a button to dismiss flash informational messages

Viewing your site:

• Added Latvian language support

• Improved layout of image galleries in newsletter emails

• Brought syntax highlight to code sent in newsletter emails

• Improved rendering of the newsletter subscription form

• Fixed a bug where social share summaries could include an image caption

Misc & Maintenance:

• Fixed a bug with horizontal scrolling of the mobile editor’s toolbar

• Fixed a bug with the image zoom cursor

• Improved some translations for built-in navigation items

• Improved lots of HTML markup

• Updated to latest Rhino editor version

• Security updates to supporting code libraries

We have a short-and-simple update for you to start this week! If you use tags in Pika, now you can filter your Posts dashboard by tag:

Exporting your Pika blog has been a support-based process in the past. You would email us, we would generate an export, and then we’d send it to you via email. While it worked, it was a time-consuming process. And we know that for some people having to send that email to ask for an export may have put them off getting an export at all.

The good news is that now you can generate your own exports without having to write us! Scroll down to the bottom of your Settings page and you’ll see a new link to Export your posts and pages. Click on through and you’ll find the option to export in the following formats: CSV, JSON, or XML. You may run an export once per day, and they’ll remain downloadable for 14 days before being automatically deleted from our servers.

So if you like to occasionally download your blog posts for storage on your home computer, now you can do that whenever you please. (Well, whenever you please, once per day. 🙂) If you ever decide Pika is no longer the right fit for you, these export formats should allow you to import your Pika posts and pages into many of the other blogging software options on the market.

And for those of you considering Pika for your blog, we can handle importing from those other software options as well! That’s still a manual process, so drop us a line if you’d like to make the move.

We don’t know about you, but we’re quite enjoying this simple blogging platform that’s home to so many bloggers writing about all sorts of things: video games, coffee, engineering, photography, finance, school, work, hardship, life… 

As this platform grows and welcomes ever more bloggers, it's important that our Pika Rules we established earlier this year are contributing to an environment that makes a wide range of people want to blog on Pika. We found some room for improvement.

The updates we made this month to our Pika Rules include:

• Clarified that conduct on Pika, in addition to content, may also be grounds for suspension or removal

• Added a rule about threatening or promoting violence against others

• Added a rule about violating the privacy or personal safety of others

• Added a note about Good Enough’s “Use Restrictions Policy”

• Added when these rules were last updated

Please read our Pika Rules in full here, which include how to report a violation, or appeal a suspension or removal. In the coming months, we also plan to test some internal systems to help us be a bit more proactive in moderating offending blogs and content.

Since day one Pika has been a nice place to post images. While Pika will always be a blog software and never be designed to be a direct Instagram alternative, we find that blogs are a great place to share screenshots and travelogues, the latter of which greatly benefit from lovely pictures.

Also, since day one Pika customers have been located all across the globe. This means Pika writers have readers from all across the globe. Images being delivered from Ohio, United States, doesn’t make a lot of sense to most readers of Pika blogs.

As of today Pika now serves images from a global content delivery network (CDN) to all readers of Pika blogs. You should generally see much-improved speed when loading up your published blog posts that include images because those images should arrive at your browser from a server that’s much closer to your physical location.

Photo performance should be also be improved because Pika now tunes your images before serving them to your readers. This greatly reduces the actual file sizes of the images. While the tuning results will vary for every image, here’s an example:

Here’s what Pika does to streamline those images:

• For the images that are displayed when your post loads, Pika serves a resized version appropriate to the smaller image size that’s displayed on screen.

• For the images that are displayed when an image is clicked for zooming purposes, Pika serves a differently-resized version.

• You can always cmd-click/ctrl-click (macOS/Windows) to open the image in a new tab at the original resolution.

• In all cases, we strip much of the Exif data from the image file. This includes removing location and camera hardware information. We’re sure to retain metadata that is important to proper image display, like orientation, color space, and copyright information.

• We apply a small bit of compression to the files.

The stats for this image…

  Original before processing: 4.2 MB
  Display: 1 MB
  Zoom: 3.8 MB
  Original after processing: 4 MB

We could definitely add more compression than this, but at Pika we’re sticklers for displaying your photos with no compromises. When we tried even a little more compression, we weren’t happy with the results in terms of sharpness or color.

Some other particularities about the current implementation:

• We aren’t touching GIFs. They are complicated, and we’re going to keep serving them direct from our servers as they’ve always been. We’ll probably improve them down the road.

• For the technical folk out there, we tried the WebP and AVIF formats, but we couldn’t get either of them to a quality-performance ratio that was acceptable to us. We will likely play around with these in the future as well.

Barry will be writing a technical post about the stack we’re using to provide tuned images on a CDN [ed: here it is]. Look for that to be linked here in a future post, or shared on our socials.

We hope you find your Pika reading experience much improved by this change. Let us know if you have any feedback!

Pika has added one more embed to the stable: Loom. Loom is one of the most widely used screen-recording platforms, making it a powerful option when it comes to instructional and educational content. We’ve even used it here at Pika to help show how to use our tags feature:

As is typical with Pika embeds, just copy the URL of your video (e.g. https://www.loom.com/share/364d4c5072e645e2863b100bc4ec45be) and paste it into the Pika editor. We’ll take care of the rest.