The Goblin Workshop
Running a WoW Info Database
There's been some rumors going around on those internets about that www.goblinworkshop.com website. I know you probably heard some dwarves dug it up out in the Tanaris desert, and I gone borrowed it from 'em.  Maybe you heard that it was some guy out of Sen'Jin Village with financial backing from the Lich King. Well, I'm here to tell you that's not how it happened.  Here's the real scoop: I invented it!

It was a cold September night in 2004, and I was hard at work in my laboratory assembling explosives, when, true as the north star, the spirit of Captain Placeholder himself descended from the sky aboard a ghostly boat and spoke unto me: “Cob, go forth and build me an automated oracle of the superb quality. The burning legion doth be incoming, and we need to gird our heroes with the most excellent infos.”

Not being one to argue when the spirits talk, I sought the council of the all-seeing shaman from the Ballistic clan and the grandmaster tradesmen from the Stonecutter guild. Armed with their sage advice, alpha access, the top-secret plans and other assorted leet hax, I boarded my trusty zeppelin and set out on an inter-continental journey in search of the rare-drop mats I would need for my vision quest.

Of course, the first implementation was painfully crude. It was painted a garish neon goblin-green. It smelled suspiciously of volatile rum, and had to be hand-cranked in order to get it to tell you where the best spot was to farm candles. You think you might have gotten a glimpse at pain and anguish while trying to please those prissy fruit elves in the Cenarion Circle, but during those early days I personally smelted down over 16,000 screen-shots in order to hand-feed data ingots into the furnace of the great beast. 

Eventually I modded up the osmotic intake and began sucking in information from the very fabric of the Azeroth itself. It only took a few full-time data miners to really flush out the tanks, with only slight casualties. These days, it's pretty much down to a science. Every morning I have to climb down into the belly of the website and clean it out. Gold farmers like to creep into the forums at night, so that has to be watched on a daily basis. Other than that, there's the usual crowd of onlookers with questions, and the always-welcome folks with feedback for site improvements. By and large, it is the fans and players themselves that drive the website: both literally in the terms of data collection, and figuratively in their encouragement that keeps me working on the site despite Blizzard's game consuming my entire life.  I do my best to get their questions answered, it's as simple as that.

The craziest mails I receive are from angry parents that want me to take  “this World of Warcraft nonsense off their credit card immediately'”, and the folks from Pakistan that are seriously convinced that I am in the market for some leather armor. Then, there's also the financial side of things, but I just let everyone talk to my right-hand man: Google AdSense. I'm not about to let my baby be fuglied up with corporate sponsorships and sell-out deals involving ogres with questionable intentions.

I know what you're thinkin'. No big deal Cob, goblinworkshop.com is right fancy, but have you seen what the gnomes are fielding?. Yeah, I've seen what they got. I gotta respect their engineering, but there's a reason Daisy comes 'round OUR hut, if you know what I mean. What good is arriving in the first place, if you can't do it in style? Yea, verithly, I can teach you, but I must levee a fee.

Cheers!

-Cob (cob@goblinworkshop.com)

Biography: Cob lives in Portland, Oregon with his super-awesome girlfriend Ceige and their vast army of furry minions. In addition to being a one-man show running goblinworkshop.com, he can be frequently be found in Orgrimmar cooking [Carrion Surprise] for starving orphans, or humping the damage meter on the bank roof after a run. His other hobbies include MUD programming, linocut printmaking, professional forum trolling, taunting Guild Wars zealots in IRC and planning the next great American indy vapor-ware game. During the daytime he also masquerades as a PHP/MySQL database developer for a small ISP while finishing up his Bachelor's Degree in Art.