Table of Contents

The Editor

Pika’s editor is a simple, intuitive, and powerful way to create posts and pages for your Pika site. For most people, blogging will be as easy as typing in the editor and occasionally using the toolbar to make some formatting adjustments. If you want to learn more about the editor’s power features, read on.

Keyboard shortcuts

If you hover over the buttons in the toolbar, you will learn that there are some keyboard shortcuts that can speed up formatting your writing. For instance Cmd/Control+B for bolding text and Cmd/Control+K for inserting a link URL for the currently-selected text. Another example is hitting the TAB key to indent a bullet in your lists. You can see most of the available keyboard shortcuts in this documentation for the Pika editor’s underlying code library, TipTap.

Markdown

Markdown is a writing syntax that enables you to format your text without requiring a toolbar or other rich text controls. Pika’s editor does not require you to learn Markdown, but Pika will recognize most Markdown formatting rules. For instance, if you type _edit_ in the Pika editor, it will be replaced with the italicized word edit.

LaTeX math

LaTeX is a typesetting system that can help you add professional mathematical and scientific expressions to your posts and pages. You can use the LaTeX button in the ••• “More” menu of the editor toolbar, or use Markdown by surrounding your equations with $..$ for inline display or $$..$$ for block display.

Excerpts

If you have set up your blog layout to stream view, you may wish to only show an excerpt of your post in a stream of posts. This can be done by clicking the Create excerpt button in the toolbar. We also support these handy variables that you can type directly in your editor:

Draft posts

Drafts are a way to save your writing in progress. When writing a new post, you will notice a Save as Draft button on the top of the page. Clicking this assures that you will not lose your post. Draft posts appear at the top of your posts dashboard.

Autosave to browser

Pika does not yet have an autosave draft feature. However, Pika will autosave your text in your browser. If you ever find that your machine or browser crashed in the middle of writing a post or page, don’t panic! Reopen the same browser and navigate to the post or page you were editing and your text should still be there. Phew! If you were creating a new post or page, just go back to the Write post/Create page screens to recover your writing.

Note: this browser-based autosave feature does not save any image attachments.

Embedding content

Pika has powerful automatic embedding features that support many of your favorite services. Just paste a link from the service and Pika will handle the rest. Here are the services Pika currently supports:

At this time Pika does not yet allow any other embedding of JavaScript or iframes in the editor.

Aliases

Pika allows you to create an alias for a post or page. Aliases first need to be enabled in Settings > Labs. From there you can create an alias when working on a post or page by clicking their Settings button.

Aliases are a way to tell Pika about a URL that should be redirected to the given post or page. These aliases are particularly handy if you are moving your blog from a different blogging platform to Pika as they allow you to make sure all of the existing links to your posts and pages still work. For instance, if your prior blog post was at the URL “https://example.com/2024/01/01/my-post”, you can add the URL as an alias when you copy the post to Pika. This way “https://example.com/2024/01/01/my-post” will redirect to Pika’s version of the post, which will exist at “https://example.com/posts/my-post”.

By default Pika redirects a few of the most common RSS feed URLs to your Pika RSS feed address. So if you are coming from another service and your RSS feed URL was one of the following, your feed will continue to Just Work™:

Known Quirks

Posts

The Posts section of your Pika dashboard is all about writing blog posts. It’s the first thing you see when logging in. Get writing!

Titleless posts

Titles on posts are optional. If you choose not to include a title on your post, where links to your post are necessary on your site Pika will generate a link for you based on your post’s content.

Change published date

To change the published date of a post, click Settings > Set the publish date. You can backdate a post or you can schedule a post for future publishing.

Tags

To add or edit tags for your post, click Settings button and start typing.

Delete a post

To delete your post, click Settings and select Delete post. You can also revert a post to draft state by clicking Unpublish.

RSS feeds

Pika creates an RSS feed for your blog. This feed allows people to subscribe to your blog in a feed reader and be notified when you write something new. If you tag your posts, Pika also creates a feed for every one of your tags. This allows readers to subscribe to just certain tags on your blog.

There are two special things that Pika does with RSS feeds that may be a bit surprising to those who are familiar with the technology:

  1. Pika delays including a post in your feed for about 5 minutes. This means if you publish a new post and immediately realize you made a mistake, you have time to edit the post before it is seen by feed readers.
  2. Pika does not include any posts with published dates prior to when your Pika account was created. This means if you are coming to Pika from a different blogging platform and back-filling blog posts from your prior blog, feed readers will not receive duplicate posts that you had already published on your prior blogging system.

Technically Pika’s feeds are Atom feeds, not RSS. Most people will not care about that distinction, but if you ever find yourself needing a true RSS feed, just add a .rss to the end of the feed URL to get an RSS feed.

Pages

The Pages section of your Pika dashboard offers more than a way to edit pages. From here you can create a custom home page, add pages to your navigation bar, and even add external links to your navigation bar.

Default home page

The default Pika home page includes two things:

Custom home page

Clicking the dropdown arrow next to the Create page button allows you to create a custom home page. Once you save this page, it will replace the default home page. A custom home page is the one type of page that does not require a title.

Navigation

Once you’ve created a page, you can add it to your site’s navigation bar by clicking Add to nav next to the page title. To remove the page from navigation, click the Un-nav link.

If you’d like to add a link to another website in your site’s navigation bar, click the dropdown arrow next to the Create page button and select Add a link to your navigation. On the resulting form, enter a label and URL for the link. To remove the link from your navigation bar, click the Delete link.

Reorder items in navigation

To change the order of the links in your navigation bar, grab the handle to the left of your page/link titles and drag them up or down.

Delete a page

To delete your page, click Settings and select Delete page.

Pika Variables

You can use various special variables in your posts and pages to do things like add some recent blog posts to a custom home page. Please visit our variables manual page to learn all about them.

Email Newsletters Pro

We have a lot to say about Pika’s newsletter feature, so please visit our newsletter manual page for more information.

Settings

The Settings area offers you many configuration and setup options.

Blog title

The title that appears on your home page and in the header of your blog.

Avatar / Favicon

Upload an image to be used as your favicon and optionally in your site header.

Subdomain

Set your blog’s subdomain (e.g. myverycoolblog.pika.page). Here you can also click through to configuring a custom domain.

Email address

The email you login with.

Change my password

Here’s where you update your password. Be careful!

Site visibility

Control whether your site is visible to search engines and other public access.

Time zone

Set up your time zone so your posts are published on the correct day.

Language

Sets the language for your site. Here are more details about Pika’s language support.

Date format

Choose the format for the publish date displayed with your blog posts.

Blog layout

Choose to have your blog posts display as a list of titles or in a stream format that includes the text of each post.

Blog post navigation

Choose how your readers can navigate between your individual blog posts:

About this blog

Give an intro to your blog. This is not available if you’ve created a custom home page.

Provide a custom footer to display throughout your site.

Additional options

Advanced: Google HTML tag site verification

When you’d like to submit your sitemap to Google, this will help you verify your site. Learn more.

Provide links to verify ownership of your site on Mastodon. Learn more.

Themes

The Themes area lets you customize the look and feel of your Pika site.

Font theme

Choose from a few font themes for your site. We’ll show you your font theme in the editor too.

Color theme

Pick from several built-in color themes or create your own custom theme. Your chosen color theme will also theme your dashboard. All color themes support both light and dark mode, which is automatically shown based on your visitor’s settings.

Custom theme

Create a fully custom color theme by setting your own background, text, and link colors for both light and dark modes. You can also upload a tiled background image for a nostalgic touch.

Custom CSS

For advanced customization, add your own CSS to style your site. This only affects your public site, not your dashboard. Use !important; to ensure your styles take precedence, and remember to support both light and dark modes.

Labs

The Labs area is where experimental features live. These are fun extras you can enable for your site.

Aliases

Allow post or page aliases to be defined. You can read more about them up above.

Add your own analytics Pro

Bring your own analytics to Pika. We support:

Note: NeatStats and Simple Analytics will only work if you are using the custom domain feature.

Email Newsletters Pro

Allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts via email. As we said above, we have a lot to say about Pika’s newsletter feature, so please visit our newsletter manual page for more information.

Guestbook

An Internet Guestbook with one twist: your readers can draw on a little canvas (or type a message if they prefer). Once you turn this on, you’ll find a new Guestbook tab on your dashboard where you can moderate entries.

Password-protected blog

Password-protected Pika blogs are available to all Pika customers. From your Dashboard, visit Settings > Labs to turn it on and enter a password. When password protection is enabled, your entire Pika site will require the password to be entered in order to see it.

If you ever regret giving your password to someone, you can always change the password. This will kick out anyone who had entered the old password in the past, requiring the new password for re-entry.

Reply by email

Adds a “Reply by email” link to the bottom of your blog posts. You can enter your email address or a Letterbird username.

Import and Export

Import

At this time Pika does not offer any automated import tools. However, if you have an existing blog of any significant size and would like help migrating, please get in touch and we might be able to help!

Export

Pika offers five export formats: CSV, HTML, JSON, Markdown, or XML. These formats should allow you to import your Pika posts and pages into many of the other blogging software options on the market, or create a static archive of your blog.

HTML and Markdown exports include all of the original images from your blog posts and pages. You may generate CSV, JSON, and XML exports once per day, while HTML and Markdown exports can be generated once per week.

For blogs with many posts, HTML and Markdown exports are processed in the background and may take a while to complete. If an export is large, we’ll email you when the export is ready. All exports are retained and downloadable for 14 days before being automatically deleted from Pika’s servers.

To download an export, visit your Settings page and scroll to the bottom to find a link to Export my posts and pages.

I’ve read the manual and I still have questions

We’re here to help! Reach out to our team and we’ll get your questions answered.