Behind the Scenes of Notes2Noone
Home servers, Linux, self-hosting, and the adventures of keeping it all running.
There’s something satisfying about building something yourself, watching it come together, and slowly turning an idea into something real.
Notes2Noone has become more than a website. Behind it is a home server, a collection of services, storage drives, security configurations, and plenty of late nights figuring out why something isn’t working the way it should.
Today felt like a good time to look back at what’s been accomplished — and what’s still ahead.
Version 1.0 — Building the Foundation
The foundation is a home server running Debian Linux. It’s responsible for hosting the website and running the services that make everything work behind the scenes.
The setup includes WordPress, Docker, databases, Nginx, multiple physical drives, and Cloudflare Tunnel. Each piece has a job, and getting everything working together has been a learning experience in its own right.
The goal wasn’t simply to put a website online. It was to build and maintain the infrastructure behind it myself.
Version 1.5 — Giving the Server a Dashboard
One of the biggest improvements has been creating a custom server dashboard.
Instead of relying entirely on terminal commands to check what’s happening, I now have a central place to monitor CPU and memory usage, network activity, storage drives, and important services.
I also configured private access through Tailscale, with HTTPS for the dashboard. That means I can check on my server without making every internal service publicly accessible.
It’s a small feature with a big benefit: a clearer picture of what’s happening inside the machine.
Storage, Services, and Room to Grow
The server has multiple physical drives serving different purposes, including the system drive, additional storage, and a drive dedicated to Time Machine backups.
Storage management, reliability, and making sure the right services have access to the right resources are all part of keeping a home server running.
There’s always more to improve, but having the infrastructure in place gives me room to expand.
Making Notes2Noone Easier to Find
A website doesn’t do much good if nobody can find it.
I’ve been working on Google Search Console, website verification, sitemaps, and search engine optimization to help search engines discover and understand Notes2Noone.
It’s a different side of running a website. Building it is one thing; helping people find it is another.
Teaching Notes2Noone to Count
Today’s adventure was getting Google Analytics working properly.
What should have been a straightforward setup turned into hours of troubleshooting Google tags, WordPress, Site Kit, Tag Manager, HTML, and browser requests.
There were plenty of confusing screens, settings that didn’t seem to make sense, and moments when the numbers stubbornly stayed at zero.
Eventually, I switched from Safari Technology Preview back to regular Safari and began seeing Analytics collection requests. Realtime showed active users, and the page-view count increased as I visited more pages.
I can’t say with certainty which specific browser behaviour caused the difference, but seeing the data arrive was a huge relief.
No rebuilding the website. No adding yet another tracking tag. Just persistence, careful testing, and finally seeing the result.
Analytics won’t tell the whole story of a website, and some visitors may not be recorded because of privacy settings or browser protections. But now I have a working starting point for understanding how people use Notes2Noone.
After all that troubleshooting, those first numbers meant more than they probably should have.
The Things Nobody Sees
A working website can make everything look easy from the outside.
What people don’t see are the configurations, the logs, the updates, the failed attempts, the security decisions, and the time spent tracking down a problem that turns out to be one tiny detail.
Running a home server means learning as you go. Sometimes a fix takes five minutes. Sometimes it takes an entire evening.
Every problem solved adds another piece of knowledge, and every improvement makes the whole setup a little better.
Version 1.6 — The Work Continues
The dashboard is running. Remote access is configured. Storage is organised. The website is online, and Analytics is finally reporting activity.
That doesn’t mean the project is finished.
There are still improvements to make, services to maintain, backups to check, and new things to learn. That’s part of the appeal: there’s always another way to make the system more useful, reliable, or secure.
Version 2.0 — The Future
Notes2Noone began as a place for words that needed somewhere to exist. The server behind it is another part of that story — something built independently, improved through experience, and shaped by persistence.
I want to keep learning, keep experimenting, and keep making both the website and the infrastructure behind it better.
This isn’t a story about having everything figured out. It’s about building something of my own and continuing to learn along the way.
The zeros are gone. The work continues.
Welcome to the next chapter of Notes2Noone.