Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

I’ve been dipping my toes into the Radiant CMS lately (a side-effect of my love affair with Ruby on Rails) and have run into several interesting moments. On the assumption I’m not alone in that, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recipes for deploying a Radiant app to an Apache-Phusion Passenger combination.

As I look at my deploy.rb file I’m reminded of the old Tom Lehrer ditty, “Lobachevsky”:

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!

Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.

So here is the result of my ‘research’ (where I remember where I got the code from, I will also quote the source; where I don’t remember, I apologize in advance):
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One of the first things our layout will have to deal with is window size. Designs too wide for the window frustrate users as they scroll left and right, but designs too narrow can also be frustrating, as they string boxes out vertically, when they would fit on screen. What to do, what to do?

Some designer’s deal with this by choosing to submit to the lesser evil. The frustration of having to scroll horizontally is higher than the frustration of having to scroll vertically, so they fix the width of their design. They choose a width that will fit within the vast majority (75-80%) of their visitors’ windows. What width they choose depends upon their intended audience: if they make it too narrow, the frustration of those with wider windows grows, and if they make it too wide, the number frustrated horizontal scrollers improves.

There’s no perfect number, so they try to balance them as best they can. So, how would someone practicing Reactive Layout approach this problem?
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