Generate links to your other blog posts automatically using Jekyll/Liquid

Since I’ve been getting some traffic to my github-pages blog via Reddit and LinkedIn, I thought it would be a good idea to start looking at the Google Analytics page. I didn’t really know why I was signing up for Analytics when I first started this blog, but I guess I thought it was cool to be tied in to such a comprehensive metrics system. However, using the system in a somewhat-serious fashion now, I was exposed to the concept of “bounce rate”, which gave a name to a phenomenon I was familiar with. Essentially, bounce rate is what % of users view only 1 page on your site, then leave (i.e. bounce1). It sounded like a gross marketing term, and I, as a noble programmer, wanted no part of it. But it dawned on me that there was no point in me writing these articles if nobody would ultimately be exposed to them.

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Using PyFirmata to rewrite an Arduino sketch

I’ve had an Arduino for almost 8 years now; I got it as a birthday present from my Dad. And boy, I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the thing. From a makeshift oscilloscope to a quick-and-dirty ESP8266 programmer , the Arduino has served me well. However, as I’ve learned more tools and languages, I began to find the base Arduino Sketch language (henceforth referred to as “Sketch(es)”, with a capitol ‘S’) kinda…clunky. Arduino should be all about banging out quick prototypes that work. Python is basically pseudocode already, so why waste time thinking about all those convoluted bytes and types and curly-braces, when you can start digging into the deeply troubling bugs in your project-design, rather than mess with the language. You know, really get in the zone.

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