This site is generated with Zola. I've tried both Hugo and Eleventty, and while admittently they were easy to setup, the learning curve to tinker with your site was steep.

When I decided to setup a new blog, I found Zola, and I realy enjoy its more barebones setup. I am in control of the templates, the styling and indexing. There are only a couple of built in values, with no tinkering or configuring to add more functionality. What you see is what you get.

My struggles

Zola is not perfect, or the documentation is atleast not perfect. Or I may just be dumb. But here are the solutions to the pitfals I have been fighting with

Tags

So, if you want tags like I have in my microposts, you are going to need the files /templates/tags/single.html and /templates/tags/list.html to even use taxonomies.

In your posts frontmatter you are going to use this format:

+++
date = "2025-12-09T08:00:00+02:00"

[taxonomies]
tags = ["random"]
+++

# The post
Yada yada

You also need this in your config.toml

taxonomies = [{ name = "tags" }]

Import HTML files

Sometimes you want to seperate your html files to make changes easier, here is how you import them into other files

{% include "navbar.html"  %}

Formatting dates

Probably hidden somewhere in the docs, but here it is anyway:

{{ page.date | date(format="%H:%M %d-%m-%Y") }}

Which gives

08:00 09-12-2025