While Pika is designed to be simple and easy to use, not everything can be discovered just by playing with it. If you’re the sort of person who likes to dig into the manual for your new toys, this is the place for you. And if you still find some things about Pika confusing after reading this, get in touch and we’ll get you moving in the right direction!
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.
If you hover over the toolbar items, you will learn that there are some keyboard shortcuts to speed up formatting your writing. For instance cmd+b/control+b for bolding text and cmd+k/control+k for inserting a link URL for the currently-highlighted text. Another example is hitting the TAB key to indent a bullet in your lists. You can see all of the available keyboard shortcuts in this documentation for the Pika editor’s underlying code library, TipTap.
Markdown is a writing syntax that enables you to define formatting of your text without requiring a toolbar or other rich text controls. Pika’s editor does not require you to learn Markdown, but if you are familiar with Markdown already 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”.
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 Pika variables that you can type directly in your editor:
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.
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.
If you paste a YouTube link it will auto-embed the video for you. At this time Pika does not yet allow any other embedding of JavaScript or iframes in the editor.
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 the ••• > Add alias menu item.
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™:
You can use special variables in your posts and pages to do things like add some recent blog posts to a custom home page.
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!
If you’re having trouble coming up with something to write, we got ya. Go to the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor and click Get a writing prompt.
To add or edit tags for your post, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Add tags.
To backdate your post, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Change published date. At this time you cannot schedule a post to publish in the future.
To delete your post, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Delete post. You can also revert a post to draft state by clicking Unpublish.
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.
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.
The default Pika home page includes two things:
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.
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.
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.
To delete your page, click the ellipses menu in the upper right of the editor view and select Delete page.
The Settings area offers you many configuration and setup options.
The title that appears on your home page and in the header of your blog.
Upload an image to be used as your favicon and optionally in your site header.
Choose to have your blog posts display as a list of titles or in a stream format that includes the text of each post.
Set your blog’s subdomain (e.g. myverycoolblog.pika.page). Here you can also click through to configuring a custom domain.
The email you login with.
Here’s where you update your password. Be careful!
Set up your time zone so your posts are published on the correct day.
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.
Bring your own analytics to Pika. We support:
Provide links to verify ownership of your site on Mastodon. Learn more.
When you’d like to submit your sitemap to Google, this will help you verify your site. Learn more.
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.
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!
To receive a fully-navigable HTML export of your Pika site, please contact us and we will get it to you right away.
We’re here to help! Reach out to our team and we’ll get your questions answered.