How to Choose a Secure Password you can Remember

As a web developer I have access to many of my clients’ passwords, and have noticed that many of them are not as secure as they could be. Here are some recommendations.

What Not to Do

Avoid passwords such as ‘password’, ‘secret’ with a single number added, or those that use your name, business name, or a family member’s or pet’s name. With social media so popular these days, a hacker can usually find information about your family online, making it easier for them to guess your password.

Avoid choosing an obvious word and then adding the year to create a pasword. I see many users doing this. For example, let’s say they are creating a password for a library, they might choose library2007 as the password. Hackers are probably familiar with this common approach and would have written code that tries guessing passwords like this.

So how can we choose a secure password that we can actually remember?

What To Do

We’ve all seen the recommendations: include an upper and lower case letter in your password, and a number. Some web sites force you to include a punctuation character in your password as well.

A great way to create a password is to think of a phrase and turn the initials or words into a password. To incorporate the number, you might choose to change any letter o’s into zeroes and letter L’s into ones.

For example, if you ran a pet store, you might think of the phrase ‘I sell cat food’ and then change it to Ise11catfood (where the two L’s are changed to 1’s). Or it could be Isellcatf00d (where the two o’s are changed to zeroes.) Then it is easy for you to remember, but hard for people to guess. To add punctuation, you could put the whole password in brackets e.g. [Isellcatf00d] or add an exclamation mark e.g. Isellcatf00d!

How to Create a Link in WordPress

These instructions work for both posts and pages in WordPress.

1. Type the words that are going to link somewhere.
2. Select those words with the mouse.
3. Click the editor button that looks like a link in the chain. (This button doesn’t get activated till you select the text.)
4. Fill in the Link URL box. To link to a web page, the address should be: http://www.whatever.com. Don’t forget the http://. To make the link trigger an email to someone, remove the http:// from the Link URL box and type mailto:someone@whatever.com.
5. Click Insert.
6. Click Publish/Update back in the Add New Post/Edit Post screen.

You can link a picture too. Just insert the picture as usual, and then click it picture once (in the editor) and then follow steps 3 to 5 above.

How to Insert an Image in WordPress

These instructions work for both posts and pages in WordPress.

1. Click the cursor at the start of the paragraph you want to put the image beside. Even if you are going to float the image to the right, you still click at the left, before the first word in the paragraph.
2. Click the little image to the right of Upload/Insert, above the editor. (If you hover your mouse over it, a tooltip will display “Add an Image”.) The screen will go grey and a popup window will display.
3. If you’re going to use a picture that has never been used in the blog before, click the Select Files button in the popup and then find the picture on your computer. Wait for it to upload – you will see a progress bar that says “Crunching” while it uploads. Then go to step 5.
4. If you want to insert a picture that has been used in the blog before, click Media Library. Find the image you want to use and click Show to the right of it. Then go to step 5.

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How to Create a Post in WordPress

Here’s how to put an article in the blog.

• Log in to your WordPress blog. This is done by going to www.yourwebsitename.com/wp-login.php.
• Click Posts in the left hand column.
• Click Add New (either in the left hand column or using the large white button near the middle).
• Enter the title of the article, where it says Enter Title Here. To be consistent with the rest of the blog, use mixed case for the title. Try to remember to put the title in right away. Otherwise the page gets saved with a numeric URL, and we want a URL that has the title in it.

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