Building Pika Out LoudModify

Since day one Pika has been a nice place to post images. While Pika will always be a blog software and never be designed to be a direct Instagram alternative, we find that blogs are a great place to share screenshots and travelogues, the latter of which greatly benefit from lovely pictures.

Also, since day one Pika customers have been located all across the globe. This means Pika writers have readers from all across the globe. Images being delivered from Ohio, United States, doesn’t make a lot of sense to most readers of Pika blogs.

As of today Pika now serves images from a global content delivery network (CDN) to all readers of Pika blogs. You should generally see much-improved speed when loading up your published blog posts that include images because those images should arrive at your browser from a server that’s much closer to your physical location.

Photo performance should be also be improved because Pika now tunes your images before serving them to your readers. This greatly reduces the actual file sizes of the images. While the tuning results will vary for every image, here’s an example:

Here’s what Pika does to streamline those images:

• For the images that are displayed when your post loads, Pika serves a resized version appropriate to the smaller image size that’s displayed on screen.

• For the images that are displayed when an image is clicked for zooming purposes, Pika serves a differently-resized version.

• You can always cmd-click/ctrl-click (macOS/Windows) to open the image in a new tab at the original resolution.

• In all cases, we strip much of the Exif data from the image file. This includes removing location and camera hardware information. We’re sure to retain metadata that is important to proper image display, like orientation, color space, and copyright information.

• We apply a small bit of compression to the files.

The stats for this image…

  Original before processing: 4.2 MB
  Display: 1 MB
  Zoom: 3.8 MB
  Original after processing: 4 MB

We could definitely add more compression than this, but at Pika we’re sticklers for displaying your photos with no compromises. When we tried even a little more compression, we weren’t happy with the results in terms of sharpness or color.

Some other particularities about the current implementation:

• We aren’t touching GIFs. They are complicated, and we’re going to keep serving them direct from our servers as they’ve always been. We’ll probably improve them down the road.

• For the technical folk out there, we tried the WebP and AVIF formats, but we couldn’t get either of them to a quality-performance ratio that was acceptable to us. We will likely play around with these in the future as well.

Barry will be writing a technical post about the stack we’re using to provide tuned images on a CDN. Look for that to be linked here in a future post, or shared on our socials.

We hope you find your Pika reading experience much improved by this change. Let us know if you have any feedback!

Pika has added one more embed to the stable: Loom. Loom is one of the most widely used screen-recording platforms, making it a powerful option when it comes to instructional and educational content. We’ve even used it here at Pika to help show how to use our tags feature:

As is typical with Pika embeds, just copy the URL of your video (e.g. https://www.loom.com/share/364d4c5072e645e2863b100bc4ec45be) and paste it into the Pika editor. We’ll take care of the rest.

Since the beginning, Pika has had an awesome social preview image, which combines your post title, blog name, and avatar. It also places these elements in a design that honors the actual theme selections for your site. It’s quite fetching, but sometimes your blog is more photo-forward and you’d rather have your photos front-and-center when you share posts on socials. Now you have that option!

Visit Settings and click on the Use the first image of a post or page as its social preview option. Now, if there are any images in a post or page that you share on Bluesky or Mastodon or wherever, the first image will be used as your social share image. If no images are found in your post, the default option will continue to display.

Please note that one limitation of the feature is that gif files are ignored since any animated gifs aren’t going to play nice with social network previews.

Lots of things have been happening in Pika aside from the bigger announcements you have seen on this blog. After launching site translations and the newsletter beta, there have been many tweaks and improvements. Code libraries have been updated, bugs have been squashed, and designs have been finessed. All in a day’s, or a couple months’, work!

Writing posts:

• Added subscription date to newsletter subscriber list

• Tweaked sorting of newsletter subscriber list

Viewing your site:

• Added customization option for the guestbook entry submission button

• For those with the feature enabled, added a “reply by email” footer to the RSS feed

• Added a noindex,nofollow meta tag to all pages on sites that disallow search engine indexing, adding additional protection to our prior robots.txt implementation

• Cleaned up meta and open graph descriptions so they did not include image placeholder text

• Added Hungarian translations

• Cleaned up the “list of titles” design layout to better handle language translations for months and days

• Various improvements to language translations (thank you, customers!)

Misc & Maintenance:

• Fixed a bug in image zooming

• Fixed a bug where Pup accounts could not create navigation items when they maxed out their allotment of pages

• Fixed a bug when editing posts with Vimeo embeds

• Fixed a bug when pasting YouTube Music playlist links

• Fixed a bug where tag-based Pika variables would include tags that only exist on draft posts

• Fixed up some cursor highlighting issues

• Fixed up newsletter subscription form that was incorrectly showing an RSS feed link on password-protected blogs

• Work with vendor to fix bug in email delivery for certain email/blog name combos

• Upgraded nearly all Ruby library dependencies

• Upgraded database server

• Maintenance work to improve ongoing server health

It’s always fun to fulfill a long-standing request in Pika, and today’s one of those fun days. You have always been able to backdate posts, but now you can also schedule posts to be published in the future!

You will probably notice that email newsletters have come along for the ride. When your scheduled post is published by Pika, a newsletter will be scheduled for delivery 15 minutes after publishing time. Excellent!

Pika’s newsletter feature is now in an open beta! This means all Pika Pros now have the feature and there’s no more need to contact Pika support in order to get access. Just visit Settings > Labs and turn it on.

With this launch we needed to consider what the subscriber limit should be for a Pika Pro account. We got out our backs-of-napkins, did some math, and landed at 1000 subscribers. At this moment Pika doesn’t offer a Pro+ or Mega Pro account, so if you find that limitation just isn’t going to work for you, please write us and we can figure something out.

Lots of updates since last time:

• Added more text customization

• Added user interface translations via Pika’s new site translations

• Improved code block handling in newsletter emails

• Added pagination to the newsletter subscriber list Just in Case™

• Stripped newsletter subscription form Pika variable if it is included in a post that is sent via email (not the good kind of inception)

• Generally improved Pika variable handling in newsletter emails

• Fixed a bug in setting the proper URL host in the newsletter context

• Fixed a bug in email sending for accounts with a comma in their blog’s name (IYKYK)