Password Management

That was a longer hiatus than I intended! What a crazy term four this has been! Reports, 2012 planning, being appointed as Digital Learning & Ultranet Coordinator... Busy busy busy!!
I'm planning over the next couple of months to transfer summaries of my professional reading (aka Uni Homework!) to this blog, plus start creating tips & tutorials that I can share with my colleagues in my new role. Today's tip is the first in that series:

Password Management Tip!

Do you have too many different passwords to remember? Try using a variation of the same password for every site.

1. Choose a word that means something to you, which wouldn't be easily guessed by other people (e.g. bananas) It should have at least 6 letters.
2. Make the first letter a capital (eg. Bananas)
3. Put some punctuation on the end (e.g. Bananas!)
4. On the end of that, put the first two letters of the website that you are signing up for (e.g. if it was google.com I would use Bananas!go)
5. Now you have an easy to remember, unique, strong password
6. When updating your password (which should be done regularly!), try adding sequential numbers to the end (e.g. Bananas!go1)
7. For edumail, which doesn't like repeat passwords - what about trying alphabetical words from a certain category? (e.g. Apple!ed, Banana*ed, Celery#ed, Durian#ed, Eggplant!ed, etc...)
8. I have found that usually I can get away with having only three different basic passwords - 1 for school related sites (e.g. edumail/ultranet/web 2.0 tools), one for personal related (e.g. facebook/gmail), and one for the bank (which seems to have different requirements to everything else!)