Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Pika. If you don’t find the answers you’re looking for here, please contact our team and we’ll get you going in no time!
A pika is a small, mountain-dwelling mammal native to Asia and North America. A Pika is a pretty and easy and pretty easy blogging service by the team at Good Enough. You’re reading Pika’s Help Center.
You can read all about how Pika works in our online manual.
We built Pika saying “Pee-kuh” (pē-kə). It turns out the name of our little furry friend is a bit controversial. We’re sticking with “Pee-kuh”–it just feels right!
Yes! Custom domains are available for Pika Pro accounts. If you’re a Pika Pro, visit Settings and click on the Add a custom domain link. There are instructions there to help get you going, but if you run into any problems, do visit our custom domains help documentation that includes more details about how to set things up with common registrars.
Yes! Pika offers a password-protected blog option for all Pika customers. Learn more about this feature in our manual.
Yes! Learn more about Pika variables in our manual.
The Pika Pulse is designed to help you discover all of the great personal blogs being written at Pika. If you are logged in to Pika, you can follow The Pika Pulse to see the latest posts from Pika peeps. While generally The Pulse represents what has recently been published on Pika, it does not include every post written. We automatically exclude:
We will also exclude posts or entire blogs at our own discretion. This could be due to sensitive content, company blogs, or other reasons. The Pulse is meant to represent writings by people, which is why we will generally exclude company blogs. (Not our own blog, though. We’re keeping that in!)
New blogs are generally not included in The Pika Pulse until they've been active for a short time and have shown that they are being written by real people writing real words.
We like free speech and we can’t be held responsible for every blog post. If you don’t like something, don’t read it. If it’s really offensive, please report it. Okay? Be nice, be civil, and think “What would Spider-Man do?”
If you visit Settings > Theme you can choose from a few font themes that we’ve cooked up for you. If you’d like to define a different set of fonts, you’ll have to get into custom CSS. Enable this at the bottom of the Theme section, clicking Add custom CSS.
For instance, if you wanted to comic sans your whole site, we’re not going to stop you:
body {
--font-custom-headlines: 'Comic Sans MS', 'Comic Sans', cursive, sans-serif !important;
--font-custom-body: 'Comic Sans MS', 'Comic Sans', cursive, sans-serif !important;
--font-custom-meta: 'Comic Sans MS', 'Comic Sans', cursive, sans-serif !important;
}
Maybe you have some hot Google fonts that you’d like to use? Here’s how to give it a go:
@import url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Space+Grotesk:wght@400;700&family=IBM+Plex+Mono:wght@400;700&display=swap");
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Spectral:ital,wght@0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,600;1,700;1,800&display=swap');
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:ital,wght@0,100;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,700;0,900;1,100;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,700;1,900&family=Spectral:ital,wght@0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,600;1,700;1,800&display=swap');
body {
--font-custom-headlines: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif !important;
--font-custom-body: Spectral, serif !important;
--font-custom-meta: Roboto, sans-serif !important;
}
Yes, we do! Mastodon verification links are a way for you to prove your identity, matching up your Pika site with your Mastodon profile. Here’s more info from Mastodon themselves about verification links and their full configuration. You can set up your verification links in Pika’s Settings.
Pika also turns the first verification link on your account into a Mastodon creator tag on your site. This tag allows links to your Pika posts on Mastodon to be tagged with your Mastodon handle. Our friend, Robb Knight, has written up all of the info you need to know about Fediverse author tags, including how to set them up in your Mastodon profile.
By default your Pika site will be indexed by search engines. You can kickstart this process by submitting your sitemap to the search engines manually. Your sitemap will include your home page, your post list page, your post tag landing pages, all of your posts, and any pages you have linked in your navigation. Here are instructions on how to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.
If you are using a custom domain, you should be able to add a DNS record at your DNS provider to verify your domain ownership with either Google (instructions) or Bing. If your site is at subdomain.pika.page, you will need to verify in another way. For Google, in your Settings we provide the ability to add your Google HTML tag to your home page for verification.
👋 We’re here to help! Reach out to our team and we’ll get you sorted.