Solved: Why Zola wouldn't build my blog

4 April, 2026 - Categories: Zola, notetaking apps, blogging - Tags: toml

By Steven Rosenberg

All of the new entries I made with notetaking apps were causing the Zola binary to stop with this error:

$ ./zola build
Building site...
Checking all internal links with anchors.
> Successfully checked 0 internal link(s) with anchors.
-> Creating 26 pages (0 orphan) and 1 sections
Error: Failed to build the site
Error: Failed to render page '/var/home/steven/Sync/blogs/zola/passthejoe/content/blog/2024-10-16-free-hosted-blogging.md'
Error: Reason: Failed to render 'page.html'
Error: Reason: Function call 'get_taxonomy_term' failed
Error: Reason: `get_taxonomy_term` received an unknown term: blogging

Zola seems to think that one of my taxonomies is blogging. Except that blogging is a category, not a taxonomy on its own. And I have previous entries with blogging as a category.

I looked at the files generated by QOwnNotes and Folio, and the line endings looked fine: lf all the way.

The solution: It had nothing to do with the files created by the notetaking apps. or their line endings.

I always forget about this: When picking taxonomies (in my case categories and tags), if a taxonomy is spelled with the same letters but different capitalization, the Zola binary will throw the error above.

I had blogging in one entry and Blogging in another, notetaking apps in one, Notetaking apps in another.

I don't know if this is considered a bug or a feature.

But I now remember running into this in the past. So it's probably a good idea to be consistent with taxonomies. either all lower case, or upper case where appropriate. In any case, when the errors happen, it's easy enough to check your taxonomies on the live site and see what's baked into your system.