Building Pika Out LoudModify

When we set out to build Pika, our north star was to create the best place to write your thoughts on the web. That means a great writing editor first, both in terms of features and design. We aim to create a blogging platform that makes you want to write, and we’re continually working towards that goal.

For those of you who write long-form, today we’re introducing two new features to Pika’s editor that you’ll typically find in other great writing software:

• Focus mode highlights where your text caret is while you’re typing. You can choose to focus the line, the sentence, or the paragraph you’re in.

• Typewriter mode keeps your text caret always in the very center of the viewport, even as you create new lines.

You’ll find these options at the bottom of the editor toolbar’s ••• “More” menu:

Together, these two tools can really elevate your writing habits and ability to get words to page. We hope you find them useful!

Sometimes you want to play around with the color themes on your Pika blog, but you’re a little nervous to lose track of your existing custom color settings. Now you can save up to three color themes, making it easy to swap between them before deciding which one you want to make permanent.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: color theme shuffle! Check it out:

We’re excited to have this new quality-of-life improvement for our own blogs, and we hope this update will be useful to you as well!

Hot on the heels of wide images is the ability to resize images, and float them around your content. Here’s what that looks like:

Like “Widen” these new image layout features are only available for single image attachments, not galleries. We’re curious to see how you use them in your Pika posts and pages!

We recently added Tables functionality to Pika. Depending on the content and number of columns, some tables need a bit extra breathing room, so we included a wide option. Today, we’re bringing that same wide option to images, because some things just look better bigger!

Widening an image will bust it out of the typical width of your post, like this:

You can find this “Widen” option in the toolbar for an image attachment. At the moment this is only available to single image attachments, not galleries.

We’ve really enjoyed seeing Pika used for both quick daily photographs as well as long-form photography essays. We look forward to seeing how this new option transforms your photos and posts!

We’re proud and quite fond of the default hypertext-focused design language of Pika blogs, but sometimes an icon just feels right (and it may help your readers). Now you can opt to use an icon instead of text when adding an external link to your navigation:

You can see what this looks like in the navigation of this very blog. 👆

The initial list of supported icons for this was built from the links Pika peeps are already linking to: social media like Mastodon and Bluesky, portfolio websites for photography and video, and a select few others options that make sense.

Additionally, we’ve made the “Add link” option easier to find (it was a bit tucked away before) and you’ll also see a search icon if you add your Site Search page to your navigation.

Hot on the heels of our site-wide Custom Code announcement, we’re excited to share that Pika now offers Pika Pro subscribers the ability to add custom code directly into your individual posts and pages.

Custom HTML is a new, flexible block type for Pika’s editor (you can find it in the ••• “More” menu). It offers the ability to inject custom handwritten HTML blocks within the text of your posts and pages, but it’s especially useful for embedding content for services where Pika doesn’t already support automatic embedding.

As an example, Flickr is not in our list of supported automatic embed services, but here’s a Flickr embed in a Pika post:

Here is what that looks like in Pika’s editor:

Here’s another one, for fun:

We’re excited to see what embeds or hand-rolled HTML you’ll add to your Pika posts! Now on to some FAQs, which are almost identical to our Custom Code announcement…

How does my custom HTML code render in places other than my site?
The custom HTML code you add to your posts is also passed to your newsletter and RSS feeds, but those services may sanitize things like script, form, and even iframe tags. (In fact, if you’re reading this over email, you’ll probably notice some stuff missing above — that’s your email client!)

We also perform similar sanitization for those same tags on The Pika Pulse, where your post appears alongside other Pika peeps.

Why can’t I use this new editor option on the free Pika Pup plan?
The internet can be terrible. We do not want to offer the means for nefarious people to misuse the Pika platform. If you want to try out our custom code features by upgrading to the Pika Pro plan, rest assured we’re happy to provide a full refund if you decide Pika isn’t for you.

Also if your subscription lapses, the custom HTML you’ve already added keeps working, but you cannot add or edit a block until you subscribe again.

How do I avoid breaking my site with custom HTML code?
We can’t prevent custom code from breaking your site, so we recommend adding only one thing at a time. If the most recent custom code that you added breaks your site, go delete it. We recommended reading our Custom Code manual for a full disclaimer and some guidance to custom code in Pika.