Building Pika Out LoudModify

Today in Pika we’re excited to announce that we finally support a feature that has been part of the web since the early 90’s: the ability to link an image to another url on the internet!

When you add an image to a post or page, you’ll see the old Alt button is now an “Alt / Link” button. Clicking it will open a new dialog to add either Alt text and/or a Link for this image. Here’s what that looks like:

The Pika editor will let you know if your image has alt text or a link with a ✓ in the button. As a reminder, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative offers an alt decision tree to help guide you on making your images more accessible.

We want the above gif to be zoomable, so here’s a different image that links elsewhere as an example:

Note that when an image has a link, clicking it won’t zoom into the image. However, that image will still appear in the overall image carousel if you start from a different image on the page and navigate over to it.

We hope you enjoy this classic feature of the web here in 2026.

1. A New Pika Variable
2. Why Table of Contents?
3. How Does It Work?
   1. Step 1
   2. Step 2
   3. Step 3
4. In Conclusion

A New Pika Variable

Pika now supports a new Pika Variable: {{ table_of_contents }}

Simply add this to your post or page (not as inline code like we did here) and it should render exactly what you expect.

Why Table of Contents?

If you’re not sure why you’d use this, then you probably wouldn’t. Pika is home to all sorts of writers and writing — short-form, long-form, journaling, prose, poetry, news, photography, etc… it makes you wonder “What is a blog anyway?” 🤔

One form of writing on Pika we didn’t anticipate is wiki-style. Some Pika sites include guides to games, or a simple help center for software, or other long-form informational documentation with lots of headers. For these Pika Peeps, a TOC can often be extremely handy to their readers.

How Does It Work?

Step 1

Add {{ table_of_contents }} (not as inline code) to your post or page.

Note: Whenever using a Pika Variable, it won’t work if its marked as code. We have to write it in inline code here in this announcement post so it won’t render 😅 Don’t do exactly what we did here.

Step 2

Save the post or page.

Step 3

When you view the post or page, Pika will output an ordered list with all the headers in said post or page, and links to those sections. We did that here at the top of this post, so you can see what it looks like up above.

In Conclusion

We only added headers to this post for fun to demonstrate the new variable. It honestly doesn’t need such a long announcement post. To the few writers that will use this variable, enjoy!

While our design philosophy for Pika is that you should be writing, not fiddling, we know the siren song of tinkering can be rather strong (yes, we hear it too).

Maybe you have a creative idea for a specific post or page and need some extra customization only there, but achieving that with Pika’s site-wide Custom CSS is a bit tedious. Well as of today you can now additionally add Custom CSS directly to a specific post and page:

You can see this new ability in action on this very post, where we have a unique background color, font, and cursor. If you leave this post, you’ll notice those styles aren’t anywhere else on this blog (notably, also not where this post is shown in a stream of posts — that can get a bit messy with variables).

We look forward to seeing what this unlocks for Pika’s advanced fiddlers!

The Pika newsletter beta has run for over six months and we’re ready to remove that beta flag. In those six months we’ve made all sorts of improvements based on your feedback (thank you!), our experience, and the discoveries that we made along the way. Most of these updates you can find in our Behind the Curtain series of posts, and we even brought newsletters into the Pika variable fold.

We’ve been really excited to send newsletters ourselves, both to send email updates for this here Pika announcement blog and to send out A Good Enough Newsletter. Those are also two good examples of different ways you might use the newsletter feature. For the Pika announcement blog, we’re using newsletters more like an email subscription to a blog. For the GE newsletter, we’re operating the account like a full-on dedicated newsletter service. Very cool!

One of the biggest improvements along the way was to completely overhaul the email delivery system for newsletters. We really dug in to understand more about email bounces, list poisoning, and credential-stuffing. We’ve built Pika to make sure our system responds to all of these situations correctly, thereby improving deliverability for all of you sending your newsletters.

Customers have sent out tens of thousands of emails via Pika. We really appreciate all of you who jumped in to try Pika’s take on a personal newsletter! We’ve built it to fit right in with the Pika you know and love–no tracking and no analytics.

Of course, there’s more to come. Just like the rest of Pika, we’ll never stop improving newsletters, so…

♛
KEEP
CALM
AND
NEWSLETTER
ON

Behind the scenes, our Pika variable processing got a much needed overhaul recently and now it is simpler to add features to this power-user Pika option. Let’s highlight how you can use Pika Variables to find posts without a certain quality.

Let’s say you have your blog layout set to List of titles, but sometimes you like to write an ephemeral micro post. You have these posts tagged “micro” and link the “micro” tag’s page in your site navigation. You then have a custom home page where you want to share your most recent micro post followed by some of your recent non-micro posts. Here’s how you’d do that with Pika variables, making use of the new without_tag option:

{{ posts_in_stream tag: micro limit: 1 }}

Here are my 10 latest blog posts:

{{ posts without_tag: micro limit: 10 }}

(Note: When you do this, don’t put the {{ variables }} in a code block like this.)

Let’s say instead of the above, you’ve developed a process where your “micro” posts are posts for which you don’t write a title, meaning all posts with titles are your longer blog posts. You can do the same thing as above, only this time using the has_title option:

{{ posts_in_stream has_title: no limit: 1 }}

Here are my 10 latest blog posts:

{{ posts has_title: yes limit: 10 }}

Now let’s say that you send some, but not all, of your posts as a newsletter. Maybe you even wish to keep your newsletter and blog posts a little separate. With Pika variables, you can now choose to exclude newsletter posts in various locations. You could create a new landing page just for your newsletter using the sent_as_newsletter option:

Here's my newsletter archive:

{{ posts sent_as_newsletter: yes }}

And you could create a new blog landing page that includes all the posts that were not sent as a newsletter:

Here's my blog archive:

{{ posts sent_as_newsletter: no }}

Please note, these Pika variables allow you to create pages that show limited views of the posts you’ve added to your site, but they do not impact your site’s primary RSS feed. At this time your feed will still include every post you publish, however it’s tagged, however it’s titled, and whether or not it is sent as a newsletter.

We’re very excited to see how you remix all of these options. Enjoy!

Here’s a scenario: You’re pretty sure you blogged about [enter thing here] on Pika, but you can’t remember when, or what you titled the post… 🤔

Now you can simply 🔍 Search in the Dashboard for [enter thing here]!

For example, we added support for embedding mp3s a while back, but it didn’t get its own post, so finding the link to share with folks in support has been a bit of a pain for us. Not anymore — just click the magnifying glass:

For this Dashboard-specific search we took a simple approach: there’s no operators or partial-text support or anything like that. But you can search your posts and pages across title, body, and tags to find what you’re looking for, and it’s pretty performant. Happy hunting! 🕵️‍♀️