Building Pika Out LoudModify

While our design philosophy for Pika is that you should be writing, not fiddling, we know the siren song of tinkering can be rather strong (yes, we hear it too).

Maybe you have a creative idea for a specific post or page and need some extra customization only there, but achieving that with Pika’s site-wide Custom CSS is a bit tedious. Well as of today you can now additionally add Custom CSS directly to a specific post and page:

You can see this new ability in action on this very post, where we have a unique background color, font, and cursor. If you leave this post, you’ll notice those styles aren’t anywhere else on this blog (notably, also not where this post is shown in a stream of posts — that can get a bit messy with variables).

We look forward to seeing what this unlocks for Pika’s advanced fiddlers!

The Pika newsletter beta has run for over six months and we’re ready to remove that beta flag. In those six months we’ve made all sorts of improvements based on your feedback (thank you!), our experience, and the discoveries that we made along the way. Most of these updates you can find in our Behind the Curtain series of posts, and we even brought newsletters into the Pika variable fold.

We’ve been really excited to send newsletters ourselves, both to send email updates for this here Pika announcement blog and to send out A Good Enough Newsletter. Those are also two good examples of different ways you might use the newsletter feature. For the Pika announcement blog, we’re using newsletters more like an email subscription to a blog. For the GE newsletter, we’re operating the account like a full-on dedicated newsletter service. Very cool!

One of the biggest improvements along the way was to completely overhaul the email delivery system for newsletters. We really dug in to understand more about email bounces, list poisoning, and credential-stuffing. We’ve built Pika to make sure our system responds to all of these situations correctly, thereby improving deliverability for all of you sending your newsletters.

Customers have sent out tens of thousands of emails via Pika. We really appreciate all of you who jumped in to try Pika’s take on a personal newsletter! We’ve built it to fit right in with the Pika you know and love–no tracking and no analytics.

Of course, there’s more to come. Just like the rest of Pika, we’ll never stop improving newsletters, so…

♛
KEEP
CALM
AND
NEWSLETTER
ON

Behind the scenes, our Pika variable processing got a much needed overhaul recently and now it is simpler to add features to this power-user Pika option. Let’s highlight how you can use Pika Variables to find posts without a certain quality.

Let’s say you have your blog layout set to List of titles, but sometimes you like to write an ephemeral micro post. You have these posts tagged “micro” and link the “micro” tag’s page in your site navigation. You then have a custom home page where you want to share your most recent micro post followed by some of your recent non-micro posts. Here’s how you’d do that with Pika variables, making use of the new without_tag option:

{{ posts_in_stream tag: micro limit: 1 }}

Here are my 10 latest blog posts:

{{ posts without_tag: micro limit: 10 }}

(Note: When you do this, don’t put the {{ variables }} in a code block like this.)

Let’s say instead of the above, you’ve developed a process where your “micro” posts are posts for which you don’t write a title, meaning all posts with titles are your longer blog posts. You can do the same thing as above, only this time using the has_title option:

{{ posts_in_stream has_title: no limit: 1 }}

Here are my 10 latest blog posts:

{{ posts has_title: yes limit: 10 }}

Now let’s say that you send some, but not all, of your posts as a newsletter. Maybe you even wish to keep your newsletter and blog posts a little separate. With Pika variables, you can now choose to exclude newsletter posts in various locations. You could create a new landing page just for your newsletter using the sent_as_newsletter option:

Here's my newsletter archive:

{{ posts sent_as_newsletter: yes }}

And you could create a new blog landing page that includes all the posts that were not sent as a newsletter:

Here's my blog archive:

{{ posts sent_as_newsletter: no }}

Please note, these Pika variables allow you to create pages that show limited views of the posts you’ve added to your site, but they do not impact your site’s primary RSS feed. At this time your feed will still include every post you publish, however it’s tagged, however it’s titled, and whether or not it is sent as a newsletter.

We’re very excited to see how you remix all of these options. Enjoy!

Here’s a scenario: You’re pretty sure you blogged about [enter thing here] on Pika, but you can’t remember when, or what you titled the post… 🤔

Now you can simply 🔍 Search in the Dashboard for [enter thing here]!

For example, we added support for embedding mp3s a while back, but it didn’t get its own post, so finding the link to share with folks in support has been a bit of a pain for us. Not anymore — just click the magnifying glass:

For this Dashboard-specific search we took a simple approach: there’s no operators or partial-text support or anything like that. But you can search your posts and pages across title, body, and tags to find what you’re looking for, and it’s pretty performant. Happy hunting! 🕵️‍♀️

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…