one inch frame

The One Inch Frame is the personal website of eric Farris. It is both a blog and used as a sort of “out board brain,” documenting the things that I find interesting or things that are part of my professional life as a systems administrator.

The name “One Inch Frame” is taken from the writings of Anne Lamott, specifically her book Bird by Bird. The concept is that large projects can be best completed by breaking them down into smaller, managable pieces. The actual term comes from being able to describe an elaborate scene while writing by tackling the part contained within a one-inch picture frame, then moving the frame. No need to describe the entire dinner party; just the lovely texture of the paté, then move on to what the hostess is wearing, then on to the man our heroine meets for the very first time. As the title of the book suggests, these big things are best completed as a series of little things, taking them “bird by bird.”

This manner of thinking is mostly common sense but is making a comeback as the “Getting Things Done” movement, based on the David Allen book of the same name, is rising to prominence, particularly in the geek/web world.

This One Inch Frame is run on Drupal, my favorite web-based content management system, an Open Source project to which I occasionally contribute code. The theme used here is my own design, and still under development. I may release it back to the drupal.org CVS repository when it has stabilized.

In addition to the usual blog stuff, this site has a large series of posts and links interwoven into the “One Inch Frames,” which document those things that interest me. I don’t really have a good navigational aid to get into that content at the moment, but ten of these nodes are chosen at random and presented in the block to the right entitled “Random Wiki Nodes.” I am working on integrating the large link repository into the wiki nodes.