Pika Release Notes

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:

Animated GIF showing the Pika settings theme screen, where the user can preview light and dark mode, choose a font theme, select or shuffle color themes, and save the selected theme.

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!

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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:

Photograph of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie

Photograph by Lettini from within the Musée de l'Orangerie

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.

Screenshot pointing to the “Widen” option on images in Pika’s editor

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!

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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:

Screenshot showing you can use an icon when adding a navigation link

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.

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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:

Screenshot of Pika’s editor with a custom html code embed

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? …

It’s August and summer is waning. Yet our commitment to constantly improving Pika is always on the rise! We’re betting you’ve noticed a lot of these changes as a few things in your dashboard have moved around. As always, there’s a mix of visible changes and quiet maintenance work that helps keep Pika simple, flexible, and pleasant to use.

Writing posts and pages:

• Improved the experience of canceling with unsaved changes in the editor

• Moved post/page Settings into a sidebar on desktop viewports

• Rearranged the editor toolbar a bit (i.e. moved Undo/Redo to the right)

• Added a “Clear formatting” option to the editor toolbar’s ••• More menu

• Updated image toolbar buttons to match other Pika toolbar buttons

• Updated our automatic embed support to include pasting in embed iframe code (for supported services)

• Searching when creating a link now finds tag pages, and you can use prefixes like post: page: and tag: to narrow down your search

• Made the Drafts list in the Dashboard collapsible

Viewing your site:

• When possible the “Back to all posts” link will now bring your readers back to whichever list of posts they originally clicked into to get to your post (e.g. your homepage, a tag page, etc)

• When using the default home page, adding your Blog page to your navigation will link to your home page, not /posts …

Pika has offered the option for custom CSS since the beginning. Many of you who are a bit more technically inclined have been asking us to support custom scripts and other code on your site. If you’re a Pika Pro, we’re happy to announce that you can now add custom code via Settings > Code. (Note that you’ll now also find custom CSS under Settings > Code instead of Settings > Theme.)

What might you use this for? We’ve written up a couple of example scripts that you can add to your site here. (Yes, Claude helped a bit writing these.) Many customers have wanted to add third-party code like custom analytics, webrings, or extra tags to the <head> of their site. We caution you, though, to make sure you greatly trust any third-party whose code you are copying, and be especially careful when linking directly to third-party code.

Screenshot of a dark-themed blog post titled “Modern Horizons and Subtle Horizons,” with “1 min read” displayed under the title, article text with numbered footnote markers, and corresponding margin notes displayed to the right.

Read time and margin notes in action via custom code

On to some FAQs…

Why isn’t my post preview including my custom code? …

Tables are finally available in Pika! Yes, tables.

Sometimes information is best conveyed by a good ol’ fashioned table. For example, here are the top names in Nationwide’s nationwide Wackiest Pet Name voting campaign:

🏅

Pet Name

Pet Type

Hometown

Top Dog

“Internet Browser”

Plott Hound

San Antonio, Texas

Top Cat

“Cheddar Big Booty Cheeseburger”

Domestic Longhair

Benton, Arkansas

Top Exotic

“Space Cowboy”

Bearded Dragon

Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina

You might notice this table is wider than the rest of this post. Depending on the content and number of columns, some tables need a bit extra breathing room, so we built that in as an option.

An example of editing a table in Pika

You can find the “Table” option in the editor’s ••• toolbar menu. Copy→pasting a table should work well too. We’re looking forward to all the fun data and information we’ll get to see in The Pika Pulse!

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