Lots of things have been happening in Pika aside from the bigger announcements you have seen on this blog. After launching site translations and the newsletter beta, there have been many tweaks and improvements. Code libraries have been updated, bugs have been squashed, and designs have been finessed. All in a day’s, or a couple months’, work!| Building Pika Out Loud
It’s always fun to fulfill a long-standing request in Pika, and today’s one of those fun days. You have always been able to backdate posts, but now you can also...| Building Pika Out Loud
Pika’s newsletter feature is now in an open beta! This means all Pika Pros now have the feature and there’s no more need to contact Pika support in order to get access. Just visit Settings > Labs and turn it on. With this launch we needed to consider what the subscriber limit should be for a Pika Pro account. We got out our backs-of-napkins, did some math, and landed at 1000 subscribers. At this moment Pika doesn’t offer a Pro+ or Mega Pro account, so if you find that limitation just i...| Building Pika Out Loud
Recently we added the ability to set your site language, and now we’re supercharging it. Pika now offers translations for many languages right out of the box. These will appear on your public site the moment you change your language selection in Settings. À la manière d'Ali Baba At launch Pika supports the following languages: Arabic Bengali Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Czech Danish Dutch English Finnish French German Hindi Italian Japanese Korean Norwegian Polish Portuguese...| Building Pika Out Loud
Pika has had the good fortune to attract blog authors who write in many languages. Today we’re offering a starting point for them to properly represent their Pika blogs as the language they are intended to be. In your Pika settings, you can now choose the language of your blog:| Building Pika Out Loud
We recently launched the Pika newsletter in beta, and we’re so thankful to those of you who have signed up. Lots of great feedback means lots of great changes. Here’s...| Building Pika Out Loud
As hinted over a month ago on our socials, we’ve been working on a simple newsletter feature for Pika. It’s taken a little longer than we would have liked, in part due to vacations, in part due to “it always takes longer,” and in part due to the perils of HTML-styling for email clients. 🐶| Building Pika Out Loud
We love to make it easy to take a multimedia link from the web and embed it into your Pika blog posts. While us internet veterans get the concept of...| Building Pika Out Loud
We have spent a fair bit of time recently working on the upcoming email newsletter feature. In the midst of that work, background images were added to Pika themes! And a few other things got accomplished as well…| Building Pika Out Loud
The 90’s called and demanded that Pika should make it easier to add background images to your blog. Who are we to deny The 90’s? Simply visit Settings > Theme, select...| Building Pika Out Loud
As we continued to be very focused on Jelly this spring, Pika tweaks have been a light. Yet still things continue to be improved!| Building Pika Out Loud
Sometimes when you write a longer blog post, it’s handy to add headings to subsections of your writing. Sometimes when posts get long, you’d like to link directly to those headings. This can be useful for sharing a section of a post with a friend, or for creating a table of contents at the top of a longer post. You can find a link to a heading by hovering or focusing on the heading itself. Here it is in action:| Building Pika Out Loud
Replying by email is a feature that I added to my blog in the time before it was hosted at Pika. Comments on a blog can be nice, but they...| Building Pika Out Loud
I bet when some of you read about Pika’s new Spotify embed feature you were wondering if Apple Music would work as well? Sorry, it didn’t work…that is until it did! Apple...| Building Pika Out Loud
Pika has supported easy YouTube embedding from the beginning–simply paste a YouTube link and the magic happens. We recently added Vimeo embed, and now it’s time to get into the...| Building Pika Out Loud
Blogging has long had a cross-over with programming education. Before Stack Overflow existed, searching the internet for answers to your technical questions would (sometimes) lead you to blog post with an answer. Often, when I (Barry) solved a challenging problem in my code, I would blog about it in hopes of helping the next person who ran into the same issue. (This also led to numerous experiences of me searching for an error message and finding…my own blog post from years earlier about th...| Building Pika Out Loud
In the past month, Pika work has been a bit lighter. We are unsurprisingly focused on Jelly of late, and also life sometimes pulls us away from Pika productivity. Still, several smaller things happened! (Always keep an eye on the blog for our bigger announcements.)| Building Pika Out Loud
Personal bloggers land in one of these two camps: 2. “I want all links to open in the same window” 4. “I want any links that leave my site to...| Building Pika Out Loud
Since launch, Pika has supported automatic YouTube embedding. It’s time to add another automatic embed to the mix: Vimeo. Many folks prefer Vimeo for sharing their creations, and we’re happy...| Building Pika Out Loud
In the past month we’ve made many an unannounced update to Pika. Check out all the small things that have been happening!| Building Pika Out Loud
We are happy to announce that alt text has arrived in Pika! Alt text is a text description of images and graphics, which you can use to make the images...| Building Pika Out Loud
When we released image grids to Pika, one of Pika’s shortcomings came into, well, focus: there was no interface to quickly get a closer look at images posted with Pika!...| Building Pika Out Loud
When we turned on The Pika Pulse we thought it would be a fun way for people to discover some of the great writing being done on Pika each and every...| Building Pika Out Loud
This here blog has never really functioned as a Pika changelog. We haven’t written about bug fixes or advertising efforts or any of that. To this point the blog has been more for feature announcements, along with occasional thoughts about blogging in general. We realized that this means Building Pika Out Loud has not really been telling the whole story out loud at all! Most weeks all sorts of work is happening behind the scenes to streamline existing features, shore up experiences, and fix...| Building Pika Out Loud
If you follow along at all with The Pika Pulse, you know that Pika bloggers hail from all around the world. While we aren’t here to announce full internationalization support,...| Building Pika Out Loud
We are pumped to announce a new layout option for your Pika blog. You can now select Stream of posts as a blog layout option in Settings. This is a whole new layout design alongside our existing launch layout, List of titles. What you get is a blog that displays your posts in full text, one after another. Like this: A stream layout complete with excerpt capabilities| Building Pika Out Loud
We want Pika users to feel like Pika is their home on the web. A place where they could have an original voice, even if just to scream into the...| Building Pika Out Loud