Building Pika Out LoudModify

Since our last Behind the Curtain post, we’ve done a lot of work on Pika. Much of it you’ve likely seen on the blog, but much of it you may have no idea about…until now! Here’s a rundown of small additions, improvements, and fixes to Pika over these past couple of months.

Writing posts:

• Added Pika variable processing capabilities in about and custom footer text

• Added the ability to filter post-based Pika variables by the existence of a post title (see the docs)

• Removed the “Need inspiration?” prompt pop-up (you can still get a writing prompt from the ••• editor menu)

• Fixed issue with edited tag names not propagating to draft or scheduled posts

• Fixed issue where sometimes Pika’s editor would add a space to your writing where a space should not be

• Fixed issue where sometimes the Pika editor placeholder text would linger a bit too long

Viewing your site:

• Added support for the new Plausible analytics script tag format

• Added support for NeatStats analytics

• Added support for Abstracts analytics

• Added an accessible “Skip to content” link for users of screen readers

• Improved support for right-to-left languages

• Zoomed images on mobile will now zoom to full width

• Fixed issue with newsletter markup in some email clients

• Fixed issue with alias URLs that contain query params

Misc & Maintenance:

• Improved newsletter delivery pipeline, and added better reporting so we can keep an eye on our system health

• Hardened newsletter subscription forms against list-poisoning and credential-stuffing bots

• Added an icon to your dashboard so you know which posts were delivered as a newsletter to your subscribers

• Overhauled our Pika variable processing code, making it much easier to support and evolve Pika variables in the future.

• Fixed up issue where Pika variables were rendering inside of code blocks

• Updated our AI block list to prevent more and newer bots

• Improved newsletter unsubscribe link, making it less predictable

• Improved certain site markup to be more accessible to screen readers

• Improved how existing post excerpt marks are handled when switching from stream of posts to list of titles layout

• Improved background job prioritization and handling

• Fixed up some bugs in custom domain settings when customers leave and return to Pika

• Normalized all tag slugs that were still a bit…off since the launch of the tags feature

• Added pagination in some places that did not have it before

• Updated to the latest version of Rails

• Updated library dependencies to patch security holes

• Always fighting spam accounts

Yesterday we announced a refreshed editor toolbar primarily built to give us space to expand our editor’s capabilities, for features like color highlighting. Today we announce another update that work enabled: LaTeX Mathematic Notation.

If you don’t know what that is, fear not, you can safely ignore this post! But for those of you in the know and who want to use the LaTeX typesetting system to express professional mathematic and scientific equations in your posts, we think you’ll feel pretty positive about this update! (bad science joke)

There’s 2 ways to add LaTeX to your posts. You can either wrap the expression in single $..$ signs to create an inline math equation like E = mc^2, or double $$..$$ signs to create full blocks like this:

\left\{\begin{matrix}x&\text{if }x>0\\0&\text{otherwise}\end{matrix}\right.

There’s also a new LaTeX option in the toolbar’s ••• “More” menu. (Also one thing to note is that simpler places like RSS and Email Newsletters can only display the underlying expression.)

We look forward to the posts on Pika getting a little nerdier with this update 🤓 especially as we consider bringing back the Pulse this year…

One of our core Pika Principles is to make Pika the best place on the Internet for writing a blog. We think we’re doing a pretty good enough job so far! But over the past year, we hit a wall: we want to keep expanding the functionality of the editor, but the toolbar was getting pretty crammed — we were simply running out of pixels for more buttons. We even put the recent Spoiler block feature into the bubble menu instead of the main toolbar.

Today we’re excited to announce an all-new, built-from-the-ground-up editor toolbar for Pika!

Besides the refreshed visual design, new icons, and new tooltips with keyboard shortcut symbols, it’s also more accessible via keyboard navigation (you can Tab to it and use your arrow keys).

But the impetus for this change was always space. We now have room to add buttons for features we already support but weren’t part of the toolbar:

• Dividers (Horizontal Rules)

• Footnotes

• H1 – H4

• Inline code

• Soft return

• Spoilers (was previously in bubble menu)

• Underlining

And as an added bonus at launch, we took this opportunity to add more functionality to the Pika editor right away:

• Text color

• Highlight color

• Justify text alignment

• Small text

You’ll also notice we removed the bubble menu that previously displayed when selecting text — that was always a stop-gap for a sub-par mobile toolbar experience, and it had its own issues. Now if you blog from your phone, the new toolbar is always accessible, at any scroll, even with the virtual keyboard open.

Our new editor toolbar is a new foundation we’re excited to build upon as we continue striving toward that Pika Principle to make Pika the best place on the Internet for writing a blog. If there’s a feature we’re missing or some other way we can make writing on Pika better for you, we want to know.

If you haven’t written a post in awhile, this week is a good time to get back to it. Happy writing!

This one feels good. We’ve added a new {{ posts_in_stream }} Pika variable for you to play with.

If your blog is configured to use the stream of posts layout, this variable isn’t quite as powerful as that built-in layout. For instance, a variable on a page cannot provide the means paginate through all of your posts in a stream. However, with some creative thinking you can really do some interesting things.

First, let’s say that your blog is set to the “list of titles” layout. And let’s say you want a home page that shows your latest post in full, and then links out to the rest of your posts in a list format? Now you can do that!

Welcome to my homepage. Also, I love to blog.
Here's my latest post:

{{ posts_in_stream limit: 1 with_excerpts: no }}

All posts # link this to yoursite.pika.page/posts

And here’s what you’d see on that homepage:

Or how about if you’d like to share your latest post, then a list of your 10 prior posts, followed by a link to all of your posts? Just do it!

Welcome to my homepage. Also, I love to blog.
Here's my latest post:

{{ posts_in_stream limit: 1 with_excerpts: no }}

Recent posts:

{{ posts limit: 10 skip: 1 }}

All posts # link this to yoursite.pika.page/posts

Oh, yes, astute reader, we’ve added a skip option to all post-based variables (like {{ posts }}). This option let’s you skip the first n posts that would be rendered by a variable. Here’s what it will look like toward the end of that post:

We think there’s a lot more that can be done with these simple new Pika variable tools. We’re excited to see what you come up with!

In October we began offering self-service exports for Pika. This was a big day for Pika as it allowed anyone to get a CSV, JSON, or XML export for themselves, every day of the week if they so pleased. At launch, though, we knew this wasn’t enough.

CSV, JSON, and XML exports are good for keeping a light archive of your writing, and at least one of these export types should be importable to other blogging services. This gives anyone using Pika the flexibility to move to another service if they find a better fit for their blogging life in the future. However, if a customer wants to have a more complete archive of their Pika blog for their records, they generally would prefer something that is more browsable and encapsulates not only their writing, but also any images they’ve shared on Pika.

This is where Markdown and HTML exports come in. Each of these export formats also include all of the images you’ve published with your posts and pages on Pika. The Markdown export has a folder for your posts, a folder for your pages, and a folder for your images. The HTML export is a browsable export. You can click through all of your posts in a browser, and see a list of your pages as well for viewing. Note that the HTML export isn’t a direct stylistic copy of your Pika site, but rather a very simplified set of HTML files.

If the Markdown or HTML export is something you’ve been waiting for, give it a try and let us know if you run into any problems. We do ask that you please not fire off both Markdown and HTML exports in your account the instant you see this post. These sorts of exports are fairly intense. A lot of engineering has went into implementing the exports in a way that is safe for our backend systems, but we’d still rather avoid unnecessarily load testing things if we can. Thank you!

Due to the size and time to process these exports, we have limited Markdown and HTML exports to be runnable once per 7 days. Just like all prior exports, these exports will be retained on our servers for at least 14 days. To create an export, scroll down to the bottom of your Settings page and you’ll see a link to Export your posts and pages.

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.

By default, all of your Pika posts have a “Back to all posts” link at the bottom. On our quest to keep Pika simple but also offer some flexibility and site customization, today we’re introducing two more options you can enable to direct your readers to more of your writing.

You’ll now see a new “Blog post navigation” setting in Settings with additional options for your posts: either showing links to your previous & next posts, or simply listing your most recent posts. You can choose which options you want for your blog.

You can see what those options look like right here on this site, at the bottom of this or any post. Enjoy!