Laker Turner

This is mostly just a copy-paste of this toot I made at 11pm last night with a little extra thrown in.

I just want to say: THIS IS NOT A HIT PIECE or anything of the sort, I wish the Pika team the best of luck, as they're making what will become a great product. Go sign up, if you want.

Pros

• Easy to setup - Took me less than 5 minutes from sign-up to first post.

• Default theme is nice (which is good #foreshadowing)

• RSS is featured on both blog home pages AND posts, however as there's no way to add an author name to Pika, the feed doesn't validate, according to the W3C's feed validator

Cons

• No Markdown support - There is a rich text toolbar, but no Markdown is a deal breaker for me

• Currently, no customisation.

There is currently three ways to customise a Pika blog:

• Blog Title
• Subdomain on pika.page, no custom domains yet (UPDATE 2024-01-22: Pika now lets you use custom domains when you subscribe.)
• A description box that shows up on the home of your blog

No theming, nothing. There used to be a theme option where you could choose between 4 preset themes, but that got removed and replaced with a link to an update post. As of 2024-01-09 (EN: One day after they removed the option), theming hasn't been added back yet. I'll update this post when they do.

UPDATE (2024-01-22): Pika has readded theming!

Ending notes

Am I switching to Pika for Concorde? Obviously not. I just spent 2 months creating this from scratch.

For other projects though, that don't need formatting though? Yeah, it's a good service, that can only get better with time. After all, they are still in Alpha.

So I'm going to keep my account around, for 2 reasons. One, I genuinely think that this is a good service, yes even if it needs a few tweaks. Two, I need a place to put poetry. I've working on a poetry collection for a few years and have been looking for a place to post excerpts from it. I'll talk about it later though. You can look at it now though, it's called Neverending.