Drupal News from the Midwest!

Some random bits of news from Midwestern Mac, LLC:

St. Louis-area Drupal Group

After taking a hiatus for the month of December, the St. Louis area Drupal Group will be meeting up (hopefully) on the third Thursday of the month as normal. We're hoping to have more structure to our meetups, and there are already some great ideas for meeting topics in 2013.

If you live in or around St. Louis and use or contribute to Drupal, please make an effort to join us and build up the Drupal community here in St. Louis!

As an aside, we still have a separate website for the St. Louis Drupal group—if anyone has ideas for how we can use that to spread the Drupal love in the center of the U.S., please let us know!

Server Check.in Launched

A couple weeks ago, we (Midwestern Mac, LLC) announced our newest service, Server Check.in, a website and server monitoring service that checks on your sites and servers every 10 minutes, notifying you of any problems. The service runs on Drupal, and integrates with services like Twilio and Stripe to handle SMS messaging and payments, respectively.

I (geerlingguy) wrote up a case study for Server Check.in and posted it to the Community showcase on drupal.org. This is the first application-type service built on by Midwestern Mac on Drupal, and we've already been hard at work improving the service.

If you have any questions about Server Check.in, or how it was built, please ask away; I had a great discussion with some other developers in this thread on Hacker News.

Hosted Apache Solr Search updated to 3.6.x

At the request of many people who wanted to do some neat new things with Solr on their Drupal sites, we've finally followed Acquia's lead and updated some of our Solr search servers to 3.6.x, meaning things like Location-based searching are now possible. And our servers are happier :)