Creating a Zola blog post in Joplin. It didn't go so well

4 April, 2026 - Categories: notetaking apps - Tags: Joplin

By Steven Rosenberg

Can I create a blog post in Joplin that easily goes from the notetaking app to the directory where my Zola posts live?

Many notetaking apps render Markdown, but not all can export an .md file.

Joplin can export an .md. First you need to specify a directory and set the note's name as the filename you want in Linux/Unix. And then it doesn't do well when I use brackets, which I need for Zola front matter as well as Markdown in the post.

If I try to manually do a link like this, it doesn't output right in the .md. All of the[and] are preceded by an escape slash, as in \[ and \]. Joplin does eventually render the manually typed Markdown correctly. It's not instant, but is fairly close.

I thought there was a workaround. I clicked the Toggle Editors button and was able to see the escapes and then tried to remove them. But soon enough, the brackets in my TOML front matter were escaped again. That's not going to work.

Note: I fixed the escaped brackets and pulled some extra spaces out of the TOML front matter in the post, and it still wouldn't publish in Zola. I had to complete replace the front matter to get Zola to build the entry. So I'd say Joplin is a no for Zola blog post writing.

What I'm thinking: Maybe a notetaking app is a hammer and writing blog posts is not a nail.