all the wikis

Your going to need a password or two

At some time during the web site design process you are going to need a secure good password. The perfect password does not exist but for good password security a random selection of 15 letters (mixed case), numbers and other characters should be adequate for most of us. Here is a good password:

mdS8AEe!Ba*dtUG

but how do you remember it:

The trick is of course that the series must appear random but have meaning to you. The secret behind the above good password is:

my dog Sam ate Aunt Elizabeth’s earring! Be a star don’t tell Uncle George

So to develop a good password. Think of a secret you are not going to divulge and encrypt it in a way that has meaning only to you, use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and other characters from the keyboard.

Checking password security

You can check password security on Microsoft’s password checker. Microsoft says its safe. I would not do it if I were you - don’t enter a password anywhere that it was not developed for. But if you want to have a go here is the password security checker.

How many passwords do you need?

You can probably get away with re-using passwords in very low security situations. However when security of your information is important or you do not want anyone else pretending to be you, you do need a separate secure password. If one password is breached you wont lose everything.

Where do I keep all my passwords?

There is no single answer to this. Writing them down on paper and keeping them in a secure location may be OK but don’t keep the paper in your wallet next to your credit card and banking details.

I use Password Safe, which is a free open source password security programme. It gets good reviews and is easy to use. You only need to remember one strong password to unlock the safe and when you need your passwords you can paste them into the required fields. Do remember though that this is open source software. Only download the programme from a location you trust. I got mine from source forge.

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