Quick Tip: Keeping Track of all those Passwords

Happy (belated) New Year! I've been far too busy and far too lax with updating the blog so my (again, belated) new year's resolution is to be more consistent with the updates. So here's a quick tip to get the ball rolling and hopefully I'll have some more substantial stuff up soon.

If you've been a web developer for any extended period of time you probably have whole stacks of post-it-notes (or maybe a spreadsheet if you're ambitious) to keep track of all your different logins. I personally have hundreds of usernames and passwords; Network Solutions accounts, Feedburner, Google Analytics, PicoSearch, MailerMailer, miscellaneous coding forums, etc. etc. Keeping track of all of these is a nightmare.

A special thanks to my colleague David G. for pointing me to a wonderful little application called Password Safe. It's a free open-source application which will keep track of all of this account information in a secure easy-to-use program which runs in your system tray. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's saved me countless hours digging through emails to find lost info. You can even store the password database on a network drive if you wanted more than one person to access it.

Download Password Safe