Panopticon requires a command line CRON job running every minute to work properly. This is what executes all the work Panopticon needs to do, including taking backups. That's the only CRON job you'll need. More than one if you have multiple sites which need to have backups taken at the same time (otherwise the backups will get enqueued and executed in a first in first out manner).
Regarding displaying the notes, this would become very impractical very fast. What you ask would only work if notes are just a line or two. The purpose of the notes field is to keep longer notes, e.g. who to contact, domain registrar information, other information required for logging in, special consideration etc. If you're displaying 20 sites with these long notes displayed the list view will be unusable; it's no longer "glanceable". If you hide that behind a button it's not much different than clicking on the site and pressing the END key on your keyboard to scroll all they down to the notes, except that it adds more clutter to what is already a very information-dense page.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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