A Behind The Scenes Look at Lynda.com

Technical specialists of all types have helped build the Lynda.com infrastructure to serve more than 14,000 training videos online. Lynda.com started in 1995 as a site for Weinman's Art Center College of Design students. It became the site for the book "Designing Web Graphics," a classic for web designers that was published in 1996.

From that beginning, Weinman, her employees and a network of authors and experts have grown the site to offer more than 200 titles in the online training library, a host of CD and DVD titles and more than a dozen book titles with more than one million copies in print.

If you visit the site, you'll probably be amazed at the wide variety of training titles Lynda.com offers. But even more amazing is that the company can deliver so many titles, in real time, via streaming media, without a hitch.

The process starts simply enough. Lynda.com instructors spend about a week in the recording booth at the company's headquarters in Ojai, CA. Engineers use Snapz Pro screen capture software for Mac recordings and Camtasia for PC recordings and track every move made by the instructors. Lynda.com's video team uses high definition digital video cameras in the studio to capture video and live action shots. Video editors use digital media tools, including Apple's Final Cut Pro, Adobe Audition, Apple Compressor, Sorenson Squeeze, and Adobe After Effects to finish, compress, and master the final files for publishing to the website and CD or DVD.

Before publishing the files, usability experts test each title for accuracy and to ensure that project files and tutorials match. Then it all goes live and thousands of users access the site every day for training in everything from Aperture, to Photoshop to SEO.

I asked Lynda what component of her online training site she considers to be the most important."It's essential that we are never down, because our subscribers count on us," says Weinman. "We have a labyrinth of firewalls, load balancers and database servers as well as people to monitor them."

Lynda.com's streaming media infrastructure runs on Windows using ASP and .Net. The company also uses ColdFusion servers.

"We're currently pushing eleven terabytes a month and growing," Weinman says. "We add new content monthly, and we'll add more than 75 new titles to the library this year."

Growing and maintaining the site hasn't been without challenges. An article published on news website Digg explaining how to hack the Lynda.com digital rights management scheme shut down the Lynda.com online training library. The company has since fortified the system.

"It was a good wake-up call, although you don't wish for those things to happen," says Weinman. "We have to be on our game all the time."

The company is recruiting additional web developers to enhance its current offerings and Weinman says the company is growing.

"We want to convert our legacy applications to ColdFusion. We're moving a lot of our systems to custom web services, and we're in the process of creating new applications," says Weinman. "We are also building new front-end interfaces, working with well-established SQL server databases, and integration with APIs. It's not technology for technology's sake. It's all required to serve our students with real value."

You can check out hundreds of free training movies at lynda.com, even if you're not a subscriber.