mite.blog

Today's server hiccup

2025-02-02T00:00:00+01:00

Today, between 13:16 and 13:29 CET, mite threw loads of errors. The application could be accessed successfully. Time entries and other data could be read and exported smoothly. But, it was not possible during these 13 minutes to create, edit, or delete time entries, customers, projects, services, or users. Our apologies for this service interruption!

The reason for this hiccup was a configuration error on our side that slipped through. Our monitoring systems warned us immediately, and many users alerted us. Thus we immediately knew that something was wrong, and could fix the bug quickly. But, we are quite unsatisfied with us. Again: We are sorry.

Yesterday's service interruption

2025-01-14T00:00:00+01:00

mite has been unavailable yesterday evening, January 13th, starting at 20:05 CET. Most users could access our service again 13 minutes later at 20:18 CET. After 54 minutes, at 20:59 CET, all requests could be served successfully again. Our apologies for this service interruption!

The reason for the downtime was a malfunction in our main data center, run by SysEleven in Berlin, Germany. A hardware node failed. Two of our servers had to be restored from a backup. mite is prepared for such problems. Redundant servers are always running in parallel. We redirected traffic to these, and could therefore limit the downtime to a quarter hour for most users. All requests could be handled once the servers had been restored. Once again: Our apologies for the interruption. At the same time, we'd like to thank the team in the data center for their fast support.

mite.nano for macOS: version 1.1.0

2024-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

mite.nano, our little app for the macOS menu bar, is now available in an updated version. The add-on should automatically prompt you for a restart, so you don’t need to download anything manually.

What’s new?

In version 1.1.0, we have expanded the »Projects« section in the drop-down menu, from where you can create a new time entry. Thanks for all your suggestions and feedback across different channels.

Projects are now displayed grouped by customer, by default. This new view should hopefully provide more clarity, especially if you have several projects for different customers with the same name.
Alternatively, you can now choose in the settings to have mite.nano display only customers in this section. In this case, you’ll first select the customer and then their project, adding an extra layer to the menu. We suggest to try out the new settings yourself and decide which view works better for you. We assume that the new customer view will be faster and easier to grasp for accounts with many projects.
After selecting a project, you choose the service for the time entry. Services are now displayed grouped by billability, as they already are in the browser version. This change is also meant to improve clarity, particularly when a service is set up both as billable and non-billable.
For customers, projects, and services with long names, more characters are now displayed. The menu adjusts further in width.

Additionally, the new version of mite.nano includes security and stability updates.

Without mite.nano yet?

mite.nano is a complementary app for macOS that sits in the menu bar. The currently ticking timer is always visible there, so you can keep an eye on your hours without switching context, and the timer is thus almost impossible to forget.

mite.nano is developed by us, and thus, like everything from our team, included in the user fees for mite. Please click here to download mite.nano for free.

eInvoices

2024-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

Next time you receive an invoice from us for the user fees of your mite, you will not notice any difference, visually. We will continue to send it to you as a PDF via email.

However, the PDF will be smarter: in addition to the visible part, a small XML file is embedded that contains the invoice data in a machine-readable format.

ZUGFeRD / Factur-X is the name of this hybrid format. It offers the best of two worlds: humans can continue to view and check PDF invoices as usual with all common PDF readers. But additionally, the data is also available in a structured, standardized format. Accounting software like DATEV and various invoicing tools can thus process such invoices automatically.

eInvoicing – a collective term for electronic invoices according to standards like ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, or XRechnung – will become mandatory in Germany for B2B in several stages, starting in 2025. This is based on the EU Directive 2014/55 and thus affects all European countries. Further information on the topic of eInvoice obligations in Germany and a timeline can be found, for example, at the IHK (in German language). Machines ready to go!

Scheduled maintenance on March 19th and 20th

2024-03-14T00:00:00+01:00

Our hoster SysEleven will perform scheduled maintenances in our primary data center in Berlin, Germany. They will take place during the nights from Monday to Tuesday, March 19th, and to Wednesday, March 20th, between 0:00 and 7:00 AM CET. During these timeframes mite will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance was completed successfully. mite was unavailable for 19 minutes.

Export time entries & projects as PDF

2023-12-13T00:00:00+01:00

No more detours: Time entries and projects can now be exported as a PDF file, directly from mite, properly formatted. Please find this new export option at the tabs »Reports => Time entries«, »Reports => Projects« as well as on shared reports.

Hopefully this new feature will smoothen your work days a little bit. In case you stumble upon any bug, we would appreciate if you got in touch, please.

News: Now on Mastodon, too

2023-11-17T00:00:00+01:00

You can find us on Mastodon now: https://mastodon.social/@mite
We will post about what's new at mite in a calm, low-frequency way. Also, we'll inform you there in case of a server hiccup.

Simultaneously we say: Good night, Twitter. For more than 15 years, we've been chirping there as @mite and enjoying conversations with lots of users. But on X we do not feel comfortable anymore. We cannot stand what this place is being turned into by Musk. Hopefully, we`ll re-connect in a more civilised space – if you want to. Of course, we'll continue to post here on our home base, our blog. Thanks, and on to more important things.

Dashboard reports: Choose which budgets to keep track of

2023-07-14T00:00:00+02:00

For each project in mite you can define a budget – in hours or dollars, for the whole project or as a monthly recurring one. A budget may help you to keep your project on track, at a glance.

On the dashboard reports, at the »Reports« tab, mite used to display a section labeled »Critical budgets«. Active projects showed up there as soon as 75% of their budget had been utilized. mite suggested to pay extra attention to these projects.

Now, you can choose which projects should be displayed on the dashboard reports:

You may want to see all active projects with a budget, or projects with a budget utilization from 50%, from 75%, or from 100%. You decide. To pick your favorite view, click on the small triangular button on the righ-hand side of the section headline »Budgets«.

Please note that on the dashboards of each team member, mite tries to only display projects that are relevant to this person. Projects will only show up there if you or the team member in question has created at least one time entry on this project.

In this section, mite will display a maximum of 20 projects. If there are more you'll see a link leading to the tab »Reports => Projects«. There, you may analyze all hundreds or thousands of projects of your account.

Thanks to all users who suggested this improvement. Hopefully this small update will make it a little easier for you too to keep track of your projects.

Scheduled maintenance on June 15th

2023-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

We will perform a scheduled maintenance during the night from today to tomorrow, June 15th, between 0:00 and 1:00 AM CEST. During this timeframe mite will be unavailable for up to 15 minutes. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance was completed successfully. mite was taking a break for less than 2 minutes.

Scheduled maintenance on June 6th and 7th

2023-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

Our hoster SysEleven will perform scheduled maintenances in our primary data center in Berlin, Germany. They will take place during the nights from Monday to Tuesday, June 6th, and to Wednesday, June 7th, between 0:00 and 7:00 AM CEST. During these timeframes mite will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance was completed successfully. mite was taking a break for 12 minutes.

Today’s service interruption

2023-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Between 14:47 und 15:28 CEST, mite was unavailable for many users. In the beginning of the affected time frame, about 5% of all requests could not be fulfilled, at the peak about 40% could not be handled successfully.

No data has been damaged. Nevertheless this interruption had a negative effect besides the unavailablility: We had to log-out all users, so everybody has to log-in once again.

The problem was on us, not our hoster. Right now, we are still investigating, we do not know exactly yet which processes blocked each other. We are very sorry for this interruption. Especially during working hours this is more than annoying. The last downtime has been several years ago ago. But, each interruption is one too many. Again: please excuse us.

mite for iPhone: version 1.2.0

2023-03-03T00:00:00+01:00

For our official iPhone app there's an update available on the App Store. Version 1.2.0 includes two new features and some polishing:

Add a new project or service while creating a new time entry. When selecting the project or the service, click on the icon with the plus sign on the right-hand side of the search field to add one that's missing, fast.
Forget forgotten timers. If a timer is still running on another day than the currently selected one mite will show you a small orange indicator in the app header.
The app has now arrived at the new domain mite.de too. Also, we polished some little things here and there.

Thanks for your feedback on all channels thus far. Adding projects and services right from within the app has been your top suggestion. Hopefully, this update will improve your workflows a little bit.

Upcoming move to mite.de

2023-02-14T00:00:00+01:00

Hey there mite.de! After many years we were finally able to buy this domain, and are packing our bags. During the night from Friday to Saturday, February 18th, mite will move to its new home.

Of course we will automatically forward you, nobody will click into the void. Nevertheless we'd like to inform you about the upcoming changes.

Starting Saturday,

the address of your account will move from https://[yourTeam].mite.yo.lk/ to https://[yourTeam].mite.de/ – please update your bookmarks
this info website and blog will move from https://mite.yo.lk/en/ to https://mite.de/en/
our e-mail address will change from to

We're sorry to cause you time and effort, but do think it's worth it. Finally mite will have a home address that doesn't have to be spelled over and over again and raise eyebrows. Hey mite.de!

Update: Welcome to mite.de – olé. The move went fine, our tests are looking good. In case you happen to stumble upon a problem nevertheless: Sorry, please get in touch and tell us so.

Scheduled maintenance on November 26th

2022-11-24T00:00:00+01:00

During the night from Friday to Saturday, November 26th, mite will be unavailable from 1:10 AM CET for about one hour. We ask for your understanding.

During this maintenance we will deploy updates to our databases to improve speed. In particular we hope to significantly boost the page »Reports => Projects« for accounts with loads of data.

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Update: Maintenance was completed successfully, our tests are looking fine. It took much longer than calculated though, mite was unavailable for 2 hours 39 minutes. But now we hope that it has been worth the effort – we're curious for the speed measurements to come. For now: good night everybody.

Scheduled maintenance on October 25th

2022-10-24T00:00:00+02:00

Our hoster SysEleven will perform a scheduled maintenance in our primary data center in Berlin, Germany. It will take place during the night from today to tomorrow, October 25th, starting at 5:00 AM CEST. mite will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes, and slow for up to 30 more minutes. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance was completed successfully. mite was unavailable for 17 minutes. Our database servers now run on new, faster hardware.

mite.nano for macOS: first small update

2022-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

The first update of mite.nano, our app for the macOS menu bar, is available. If the app is already installed on your Mac, a notification should pop up automatically, asking you to please restart it.

Version 1.0.2 includes regular security updates plus three little improvements of the area labeled »Last used«:

mite.nano now suggests up to ten instead of only five last used time entries to pick and start a new time entry. We wanted to raise the possibility to suggest something relevant here, and ten entries should still be scannable enough.
The suggestions are now sorted by customer, not by project. This should especially speed up picking an entry in case you have several projects with the same name for different customers.
Every character couunts: mite.nano now makes better use of the available horizontal space. This should improve the identification of customers, projects, and services with long names.

This is a small update of mite.nano. Regarding a future bigger one, we'd like to emphasize that yes, we heard your feedback on all channels asking for a future support of notes of time entries. Thanks for telling us. Thus far, we haven't found a convincing way to realize it. But, we'll keep tinkering.

Yolk became mite

2022-08-26T00:00:00+02:00

A quick announcement on our own behalf: We changed the legal name of our company, but are still the same crew. Our Yolk – Sebastian Munz & Julia Soergel GbR is now called mite GmbH, still registered in Berlin, Germany. Besides the name, nothing changed for you, it was a so-called “identity-preserving conversion”.

Comprehensibly, it used to cause some confusion why our time tracking tool is called mite but the team developing it Yolk. Now, it should be much simpler: The software mite is a service run by the mite GmbH, period. Thanks for your attention, onwards to more important things!

Scheduled maintenance on June 6th

2022-06-03T00:00:00+02:00

During the night from Sunday to Monday, June 6th, between 0:15 and 1:30 AM CEST, mite will be unavailable for up to 15 minutes.

We will switch some of our servers to new ones with up-to-date, improved services. To do this properly, we’ll have to take the app down for a couple of minutes. This update is necessary to ensure mite will continue running smoothly and safely. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance was completed as planned. mite was unavailable for two minutes. You should not notice any changes besides mite running a little faster in some cases. But in case you happen to stumble upon any problem nevertheless, please tell us in as much detail as possible so we can fix it right away.

Scheduled maintenance on April 5th and 6th

2022-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Our hoster SysEleven will perform scheduled maintenance in our primary data center in Berlin, Germany. The first part will take place during the night from today to tomorrow, April 5h, the second one during the following night on April 6th. Both maintenance windows will run from 0:00 until 7:00 AM CEST. During these timeframes, mite will be unavailable for a total of up to 30 minutes. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance was completed successfully. mite was unavailable for a total of 19 minutes and very slow for an additional 20 minutes.

mite for iPhone: first small update

2022-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

There's a first update available on the App Store for our official iPhone app. Version 1.1 includes two improvements and one bugfix:

Swipe left or right to switch between days.
To navigate to an earlier or future day, there were and still are arrow buttons available in the top navigation. The new gesture should make switching days even easier, and facilitate the use of the app with a single hand.

Pull to refresh: Drag the list of a day's time entries downward to manually update all of its data.
Until now, you had to switch days to force a reload. The new gesture should speed up the process, and improve the app for those who use mite on several devices at the same time.

Minor bugfix: If you stopped the timer on a time entry outside of the app by directly switching the timer to another entry, the app didn't update the hours of the first entry correctly.

Hopefully, this update will improve mite for iPhone a little. The two new gestures have been the top user requests so far. Thanks for your numerous, constructive feedback on all channels! We are happy to hear that you appreciate the app.