Warcraft Update

Completed: April 7th, 2009
Medium: Twitter, Web Browser
Technologies: PHP, CSS, Twitter API
Link: http://warcraftupdate.net

Warcraft update started off as a simple idea to track an in-game event for World of Warcraft. After doing some research, I decided to start on a smaller scale and track something outside of the game. Server status.

Tracking the server status it’s self is simple. Blizzard Entertainment provides an XML based server status page; Warcraft Update checks this XML document for statuses and compares it to past statuses. If the status has changed, it fires off an alert.

Warcraft Update uses over 241 Twitter accounts (one for each Warcraft server) to send out alerts.

After the successful development of simple server tracking, I decided to take things one step further:

Throughout the year, Blizzard Entertainment holds in-game events that provide World of Warcraft players with tasks and mini-games to complete. Warcraft Update automatically collects information when these events begin and sends out Twitter updates at the correct starting time.