Building Pika Out LoudModify

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)

Recently we added the ability to set your site language, and now we’re supercharging it. Pika now offers translations for many languages right out of the box. These will appear on your public site the moment you change your language selection in Settings.

At launch Pika supports the following languages:

• Arabic

• Bengali

• Chinese (Simplified)

• Chinese (Traditional)

• Czech

• Danish

• Dutch

• English

• Finnish

• French

• German

• Hindi

• Italian

• Japanese

• Korean

• Norwegian

• Polish

• Portuguese

• Spanish

• Swedish

• Vietnamese

If the language you are blogging in is not listed here, please do request it. We’ll be happy to add it as soon as we can. And if your language is already supported, but you find mistakes in our implementation, please let us know. We’ll admit that the great AI in the sky helped us bootstrap this feature, and we’d love to fine tune it with your help. Thank you in advance!

Over time Pika’s language support will grow, and we’ll continue to maintain a list of all supported languages in our help section.

Pika has had the good fortune to attract blog authors who write in many languages. Today we’re offering a starting point for them to properly represent their Pika blogs as the language they are intended to be. In your Pika settings, you can now choose the language of your blog:

When this language is selected, here’s what will happen:

• The <html> tag on your site will include a lang attribute with your chosen language (and locale if necessary)

• Your RSS feeds will indicate the language of your content

• The open graph tags on your site will also indicate your language and locale

While this is all behind the scenes, you should see a number of accessibility benefits. Your language selection will improve automatic translation detection by browsers, hyphenation, RSS feed reader behavior, and more. This is a starting point, and in the future we would like to offer more capabilities to override the  language that is used throughout your Pika site.

The documentation for these language settings is challenging to say the least, so do let us know if you see any mistakes in our implementation.

We recently launched the Pika newsletter in beta, and we’re so thankful to those of you who have signed up. Lots of great feedback means lots of great changes. Here’s the latest:

• Added an option to override the reply-to email address on newsletter emails

• Added text customization options for the newsletter subscription interface (form, messages, etc)

• Improved subscription form styling

• Stopped showing unverified subscribers in the Newsletter tab

• Started expiring newsletter verification links after 7 days

• Added an option to not automatically include newsletter forms on your site

• Added a Pika variable so you can place a newsletter subscription form on any post or page

• Fixed an issue with some word-spacing compression in the newsletter text

• Cleaned up the email itself, including improving various styles and adding placeholder text for embedded iframes

We’ve done our best to keep our newsletter documentation up-to-date with these changes. Continue to let us know if you have any feedback!