Economy of Effort

I admit it – for a long time, I have been using two passwords for everything. Neither were particularly strong passwords – both 8 characters or less, and only one wasn’t all letters. That has finally changed, thanks to a little program called KeePass.

KeePass is a free, open-source program for creating and managing passwords. It lets you create random passwords of any length, and saves them in an encrypted, password-protected database. The idea is that you memorize only one password (for the database), and then you create a bunch of random passwords that you don’t ever need to actually know – you just access them from KeePass when you need them. It lets you copy a password to the clipboard with a quick click, and then it clears the clipboard after 10 seconds (so that nobody can come along later and repeat the “Paste” action).

KeePass is a Windows app, but has also been ported to Linux and Mac OS X. I haven’t tried the Mac version yet, but the Linux port is great – a near-perfect replication of the Windows version.

Now I have strong passwords for everything that matters, and even places that don’t. Even if you don’t use it for crazy strong passwords, it is useful for storing usernames and passwords for all your websites – because you can never get the same username and password for every site, and sometimes it’s hard to remember them for sites that you don’t go to everyday. It’s much nicer to have them stored in your KeePass database. And you can copy the database to a thumb drive and take your passwords with you – just install KeePass on the computer that you’re using (probably not a good solution for public terminals, but it’s great for going back and forth between a work PC and a home PC). Since the database is encrypted, you don’t have to worry about losing your thumb drive or having someone hop on your computer and pulling up the database – they’d have to break the encryption first. (Saving passwords in your browser might defeat that, but then at least you’re only exposed if they have physical access to your PC, and you pretty much are exposed in that event anyway).

It’s a great program, and if you get yourself in the habit of using it, it becomes a convenience much more than a hassle – especially for the ability to manage various usernames and passwords for different websites.

Thanks to an updated plugin called XrisXros, Economy of Effort posts are now once again showing up on my MySpace mirror. What’s more, I also have a new mirror at a blogging site called MindSay. I haven’t explored MindSay very deeply, but it looks like a pretty straightforward blogging service.

Hooray for spreading The Word (well, my words) across a multitude of blog services.

I tried del.icio.us a few months back, and simply did not see the appeal of it. It’s a service that allows you to save bookmarks online. OK, so what? It wasn’t until this past week where I re-visited the site and finally “got it”.

del.icio.us lets you store bookmarks with metadata – that whole “tags” thing that you see popping up in a bunch of different websites. For example, I could bookmark “CollegeFootballNews.com” and I might assign tags like “football” and “college” to it. Then, other sites that I bookmark might get tagged with “football” too. So when I browse by the “football” tag, I see all the websites I’ve tagged as “football”.

Now, if that was it, then it wouldn’t be very interesting. But there are a couple of important features on top of that. First, this is a social bookmarking service. Which means, you can see what other people have bookmarked, how many people have bookmarked any given page, and search for bookmarks. Not only can you dig through random aggregate bookmarks, but you can see bookmarks of individual people, including “subscribing” to bookmark feeds of your friends or people that you find bookmark interesting things. It’s a very neat way to discover new websites, as well as search for sites and sometimes get different/better results than you might with a Google search. Also, you can set certain bookmarks to “private”, so that your porn bookmarks aren’t on display to the world. You naughty readers.

Secondly, every page on del.icio.us contains an RSS feed of the bookmarks on it. If you combine that with Firefox’s “Live Bookmarks” feature, you can have sets of bookmarks inside your browser that you can update from any of your computers, and have those updates show up in Firefox on every other computer you use Firefox on. But even without that, it’s nice to be able to pull up the del.icio.us website and have your bookmarks anywhere.

What I’ve discovered is that the tagging system allows me to store a much larger amount of bookmarks than I am comfortable with in a traditional, in-browser system, and gives me an easy way to find things later. Bookmarks can have many tags, and so instead of just seeing all football sites when browsing the “football” tag, I can narrow it down to college football by looking at the “football” and “college” tags together (“football+college”), and maybe even narrow it down further to sites about draft prospects (“football+college+draft”), etc.

There are a bunch of applications for this that I’ve thought of or already began doing:

* Sometimes I find a website and I want to read it later. I have a tag called “scraps” which I use to tag just those sorts of pages. Oftentimes I would just open a new Firefox tab and leave the old tab on the site to go back to… which would work OK until I’ve done it a few times and then notice Firefox is eating all of my RAM.

* I’ve bugged Stacey for a long time to maintain a wish list, so that people can know what to buy her for gift-giving occasions. I’ve though about writing a PHP-based “wish list” script but I have too many other projects that I need to spend my time on. She has been copying and pasting links into a Word document, which works OK except I have to have her email it to me anytime I want to see the latest version. Instead, I could have her bookmark those sites and tag them with “wishlist”, which would allow me or anyone else to see her wish list at any time.

* Subscribing to an RSS feed of the most recent popular bookmarks – giving me a finger on the pulse of the Internet (or, at very least, a steady stream of interesting things to read – this is where a lot of my “scraps” bookmarks come from)

I want to get a lot of friends & net-friends using del.icio.us, if only so that I can “subscribe” to them and check out their bookmarks. Right now, some of the site’s functionality is down, as they are restoring things from a power failure & database corruption. But the basic bookmarking & tagging works, so sign up and get your bookmarks online & tagged. Pretty soon, you’ll find a lot of other new, neat stuff to bookmark.