If you spend any amount of time playing around with websites or blogs (which is pretty much everyone at this point – Exhibits A, B, and C) the following resources should be bookmarked immediately.
Strong Password Generator
One of the best ways to prevent someone from hacking into your website or blog is to create and use strong passwords. What makes a password strong?
- It’s not a common name (your name, your friend’s name, your dog’s name, you get the gist)
- It’s not a real word (if it’s in the dictionary it’s no good)
- It’s not a keyboard pattern (like “qwerty”, “asdfghjkl”, or “12345678”)
- It has at least 15 characters which include:
- uppercase letters
- lowercase letters
- numbers
- symbols (like !"?$?%^&*)
- It’s unique (only used for one website)
Sound like a chore to create passwords that adhere to all of those guidelines? That’s why you need www.strongpasswordgenerator.com. It will randomly generate as many strong passwords as you need. And if you’re the overachieving type (or just plain paranoid), you can generate passwords up to 100 characters in length! Just remember to save the passwords somewhere safe for later retrieval.
Cost: FREE.
Refresh Your Cache
Ever make an edit to a web page or blog post, then view it in a browser only to find your edit missing? Assuming you saved your changes, the most likely culprit is the browser cache. To speed up web browsing, your browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer – it doesn’t matter which one you use they all do it) saves a version of the web pages you visit to to a local memory file on your computer called the cache. When you visit these pages again, the browser displays the saved pages from the cache instead of downloading the most recent version from the web. It’s great for speed, but will drive you insane when you want to troubleshoot your code.
To really fix the problem you have to clear the browser’s cache (force refresh doesn’t always work). Enter www.refreshyourcache.com. They provide detailed, step by step instructions on clearing the cache for every major browser, even IE6 (shudder). So it’s also a great resource when you have to explain to someone else how to clear THEIR cache (like clients or your mom).
Cost: FREE.