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!
Blogging is a place where you should be able to write your thoughts and feelings without fear of censorship, but we do have some rules. We reserve the right to remove a blog for any reason, but we will most definitely remove blogs that contain:
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.
Pika accepts the following payment methods:
Yes! Pika offers a password-protected blog option for all Pika customers. Learn more about this feature in our manual.
No, we don’t have a mobile app. We feel that the web is the best place to write and read blogs. We have taken pains to make sure Pika looks fantastic on all devices. Pika fully supports being installed as a home screen app on all of your devices. Here is an (unfortunately ad riddled) site explaining how to do that for iOS, iPadOS, and Android.
Yes! Learn more about Pika variables in our manual.
You are welcome to write as much custom CSS as you like.
While we are careful not to change the skeleton of our markup, it is possible that it will evolve in the future.
If you see a class that begins with the prefix site-,
you can be confident that we will be taking special care to avoid changing that class
(and we’ll be sure to let you know if we do change it).
Here is a non-exhaustive list of classes that we are currently providing:
| Class Name | Element | Description |
|---|---|---|
.site-header |
header | Site header |
.site-nav |
nav | Site nav |
.site-meta |
footer | Any meta footer, such as at the end of a post or a list of posts |
.site-blog-index |
body | The blog page at /posts |
.site-post-body |
body | A post |
.site-post-[id] |
body | A specific post, with [id] being a unique number representing the post |
.site-post |
article | The post content container |
.site-home-page |
body | Home page |
.site-page-body |
body | A page |
.site-page-[id] |
body | A specific page, with [id] being a unique number representing the page |
.site-page |
div | The page content container |
.site-tag |
body | Tag listing page |
.site-tag-[id] |
body | A specific tag, with [id] being a unique number representing the tag |
.site-guestbook |
body | Guestbook page |
.site-new-guestbook-entry |
body | Guestbook signing page |
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;
}Or maybe you have a font stored elsewhere on the web? Here’s another way to include that custom font:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Custom-Font';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
src: url('https://example.com/Custom-Font.ttf') format('truetype');
}
body {
--font-custom-headlines: 'Custom-Font', 'Comic Sans', cursive, 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. The verification link will just be the URL of your Mastodon profile. So for Pika’s blog, the link is: https://mastodon.world/@goodenoughllc.
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.
Pika does not cross-post to any social network directly, and at this time we don't intend to build that feature into Pika. Building integrations with social networks is time consuming, and these integrations are often unreliable. We’re a small team and we want the bulk of our time and energy to be spent building the best software we can, with fantastic features that help you write blog posts of which you will be proud.
If you do want to automate sharing your posts to social networks, we recommend the excellent EchoFeed. Our team uses it personally and it's fantastic! As a reminder, Pika offers multiple RSS feeds for your blog.
👋 We’re here to help! Reach out to our team and we’ll get you sorted.