We all have passwords, hundreds of them. If you’re anything like me, it’s likely that you have two or three passwords that you use on a bunch of different websites; an easy one for your hundreds of trivial sites, a slightly more complicated one for your email and Amazon, and lastly a complicated one for banking. And again, if you’re anything like me, chances are your passwords aren’t terribly good… and you can never remember that online banking one.

With more of our personal information stored away behind passwords, it’s important that you are using good ones. A good password is one that is difficult to discover by guessing, even if the guesser is quite clever. Wikipedia defines a strong password as one that:

• includes numbers, symbols, uppercase, and lowercase letters
• is around 12-14 characters
• avoids repetition, dictionary words, or biographical information

Furthermore, you should never re-use your passwords; for optimal security, you should use a different password on each website you visit.

So how in the world can you remember one strong password, let alone one for each website you visit? One option is to download a software program that will generate random strong passwords for you, and automatically enter them into the appropriate websites. The problem with using these password generation and management programs, however, is that your online identity becomes completely dependent on the management software; you’re completely hosed if you need to log into a site using a public computer, or your hard drive fails. Luckily, I have trick that makes generating and remembering strong passwords much easier than you think.

The first step is to choose a “base” password. Think up a word or phrase that’s reasonably long and easy for you to remember. Naturally, I’m going to use the phrase “I love atBar”, sans spaces. Now here’s the trick. Place your hands on the keyboard, and shift your fingers one row up, one row down, or one key to the right, then type your phrase. By shifting my fingers up one row on the keyboard, “IloveatBar” becomes “*o9f3q5Gq4″. That looks an awful lot like a strong password, doesn’t it? It includes numbers, symbols, uppercase and lowercase letters, avoids dictionary words, and it’s pretty long. All that, and it’s still easy to remember.

Now how do you make a new password for each website? Again, I’ve got an easy trick. Take the first letter of each syllable in the website title, and append that to your base password. The first letters of the syllables in atBar  are “ab”, so using the base password from above, my password for atBar would be “*o9f3q5Gq4ab”. The first letters of the syllables in Amazon are “amz”, so my password for amazon.com would be “*o9f3q5Gq4amz”. My Twitter password would be “*o9f3q5Gq4tt” and so on.

Now granted, when using a pattern like this to create your passwords, if someone gets wise to your scheme, you could still be up the creek. However, if a malicious party intercepted a single password generated using this method, I suspect it would be very difficult to figure out the patterns involved. And it’s sure a heck of a lot more secure than using the same password on all your accounts like I used to do.