Why I’m betting my knowledge on a 20-year-old “blogging platform”
I’ve watched people lose years of their lives to note-taking apps.
Not lose as in “wasted time taking notes.” Lose as in: the app shut down, the sync broke, the company pivoted, the export was corrupted — and thousands of hours of carefully cultivated knowledge vanished into the digital void.
I spent a lot of time researching what people actually say about their “second brain” tools. Not the honeymoon posts. The breakup posts. The Reddit threads at 2am where someone realizes their life’s work is trapped in a proprietary format. The forum complaints about sync conflicts that ate three years of notes.
What I found changed how I think about where knowledge should live.
The Graveyard of Second Brains
Here’s a partial list of note-taking apps that have shut down, been acquired and gutted, or abandoned their users in the last decade:
- Google Keep (still alive, but for how long? Remember Google Reader?)
- Simplenote (acquired, stagnated)
- Vesper (dead)
- Catch Notes (dead)
- Springpad (dead)
- Editorially (dead)
- Draft (dead)
- Knowtify (dead)
- Workflowy (struggling)
And these are just the ones I remember. For every Notion success story, there are a dozen startups that took your notes with them when they folded.
Even the survivors aren’t safe. One user on Reddit captured the anxiety perfectly:
“I am just tired of switching apps in search of the perfect one. I’m tired of falling in love with new applications that end up shutting down. I’m tired of changing my apps and systems instead of working… I have already gone through eight apps this year.”
Eight apps. In one year. That’s not knowledge management — that’s digital nomadism with your brain as the casualty.
The Dirty Secret About “Modern” Note Apps
When people complain about Notion, Obsidian, Roam, or whatever the hot new PKM tool is, the same themes emerge over and over:
They’re too slow. One developer’s rant about Notion went viral:
“The most infuriating issue I faced was the input lag. When you start typing, and there’s a noticeable delay before the text appears on the screen. This made me FURIOUS! HOW is it possible that in 2025, a program can have input lag?”
Thought moves at the speed of thought. If your tool can’t keep up, you’ll stop using it. And you’ll blame yourself for “not sticking with it.”
They’re too complicated. The Obsidian subreddit is full of people who spent more time configuring their system than using it:
“I’ve tried to use Obsidian for 1 year, but each time I try to use it, I gave up after 1 or 2 notes because I feel I’m not taking notes the right way. I read and watched so many videos, posts, techniques, workflow, etc, but everything is so complex.”
They don’t own their data. This one’s the killer. A European teacher explained why Notion is off the table:
“As a teacher I just can’t use Notion or any other US-service based on US cloud services. All claims concerning GDPR are nonsense due to Privacy Shield. I am not allowed to use such services.”
And even if you’re not bound by GDPR, do you really want your private thoughts, half-formed ideas, and personal journals sitting on some startup’s servers? Waiting for the next data breach or acquisition?
What Survives
Here’s what I realized after months of research: the tools that survive are boring.
Plain text files. Markdown. Self-hosted solutions. Things you control.
One Hacker News commenter — someone who’d been through every note app imaginable — landed here:
“After trying Evernote, Workflowy, Notion, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain timestamped markdown files linked together. Edited with vim and a few bash scripts… It’s wonderful. Surprisingly easy. Fast.”
The pattern is clear: long-term knowledge management requires boring infrastructure.
Which brings me to WordPress.
The Case for WordPress
I know what you’re thinking. “WordPress? The blogging thing? For my second brain?”
Hear me out.
WordPress has been around for 21 years. It powers 43% of the web. It’s not going anywhere. There’s no VC pressure to pivot, no acquisition threat, no runway running out.
When you’re building something meant to last decades — and a second brain should last your whole life — the age and stability of your platform matters more than the latest features.
You own everything. Your WordPress site can run on a $5/month server you control. The database is MySQL — the most boring, well-documented database in existence. Your content is stored in standard formats. If WordPress somehow disappeared tomorrow (it won’t), you could still access your data with any MySQL client.
Compare this to Notion, where your “export” is a weird nested folder structure that loses half the formatting. Or Roam, where your JSON export is so complex that third-party tools struggle to parse it correctly.
You already know how to use it. If you’ve ever written a blog post, you know the WordPress editor. The learning curve is approximately zero. No YouTube tutorials required.
The Missing Piece
Here’s the thing though: despite WordPress being the obvious choice for long-term knowledge management, nobody had built a proper “second brain” plugin for it.
The existing wiki plugins are stuck in 2010. They use shortcodes. They don’t work with the modern block editor. They’re designed for customer support knowledge bases, not personal thinking tools.
So I built one.
It’s called Noggin, and it does exactly four things:
- Notes — A dedicated space for your thoughts, separate from your blog posts
- Links — Connect notes with
[[double brackets]]or a toolbar button - Backlinks — See what notes link to the current one
- Search — Find anything instantly
That’s it. No graph view (users don’t actually use those — research shows it’s mostly for screenshots). No complex databases. No Zettelkasten methodology enforcement. No AI features you didn’t ask for.
Just notes, links, and the confidence that your knowledge will still be there in 20 years.
The Real Insight
After 170 iterations of planning and research, here’s what I learned:
People don’t abandon PKM tools because the tools lack features. They abandon them because the tools have too many features.
Every “productivity system” that demands you reorganize your brain to match its structure is doomed to fail. The tool should adapt to you, not the other way around.
And every tool that locks your data in a proprietary format, or requires an internet connection, or depends on a startup staying in business, is borrowing your knowledge on terms you didn’t agree to.
WordPress is boring. It’s old. It’s not sexy.
But it’ll be here when the hot new app is a footnote in a TechCrunch shutdown announcement.
Your second brain deserves better than to be a startup’s failed experiment.
Try Noggin
If you want to give this approach a shot, Noggin is free and open source. Install it on any WordPress site:
No account required. No sync fees. No data harvesting. Just your knowledge, on your server, in a format that’ll outlive us all.
Because the best note-taking system isn’t the one with the most features.
It’s the one you’ll still be using in 10 years.