Lots of big things in the world start out small. The speed of a race car begins with a tiny spark in a cylinder inside its engine. The processing power of the world's fastest supercomputer comes from the movement of tiny electrons. On a more modest scale, a ball of bread dough can triple in size thanks to the action of microscopic yeast.

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©2007 HowStuffWorks
The HowStuffWorks logo, then and now

HowStuffWorks is the same way. The site made its debut in 1998 with just a few articles, which its founder, Marshall Brain, wrote at his kitchen table. Brain, who was a professor at N.C. State University, wrote about subjects that interested him. Between January and June of 1998, he wrote about 50 articles. His goal was to make information accessible to everyone -- to write about complex topics in a way that wasn't too complex for children or too simple for adults.

HowStuffWorks now operates from an office that spans two floors of a high-rise building in Atlanta, but it continues to pursue Brain's original goal. A staff of editors and writers, along with a pool of freelancers, adds new articles to the site every day. These articles are friendly, engaging and accessible. They apply Brain's original method of breaking complex ideas down into easy-to-understand concepts to a range of topics. Today's HowStuffWorks covers everything from fear to the multiplayer role-playing game "World of Warcraft."

Today, HowStuffWorks has a global audience and millions of monthly visitors. The site has also won numerous awards, including four Webby awards in 2007 -- both the Webby Award and the People's Voice Award in the categories of education and best copy/writing.

In this article, we'll look at how HowStuffWorks creates new content. We'll also explore the other departments and teams who keep the site running.

Backstage Tech
Want to know more about the technology behind HowStuffWorks? Here are some tidbits:
  • ­It currently takes 1,148,356 lines of code to run the Web site.
  • Thirty servers handle all of HowStuffWorks' production opera­tions.
  • HowStuffWorks has data centers on the East and West Coasts. Web traffic is routed to the closest data center.
  • ­The site's image library includes more than 8.5 gigabytes of data.
  • All of the equipment in the HowStuffWorks data centers, including servers, disk arrays, switches, routers and firewalls, uses 77 amps of power (at 110 volts). ­