Blog - Boldacious Digital

These days we need to remember many passwords – they should be different for each website and be a random list of characters which, by definition, are almost impossible to remember.

So – what to do?

Password managers!

Wikipedia’s definition:
“A password manager is a software application that helps a user store and organize passwords. Password managers usually store passwords encrypted, requiring the user to create a master password; a single, ideally very strong password which grants the user access to their entire password database. Some password managers store passwords on the user’s computer (called offline password managers), whereas others store data in the provider’s cloud (often called online password managers). However offline password managers also offers data storage in users’s own cloud accounts rather than provider’s cloud. While the core functionality of a password manager is to securely store large collections of passwords, many provide additional features such as form filling^[1] and password generation.^[2]”

There are many password managers to choose from – I use and recommend Roboform (disclosure: this is an affiliate link – I get a small commission if you buy Roboform – but there is a free version)

I love Roboform – I have a single strong master password – then this opens up Roboform which then logs me into whatever site I want with it’s own strong password that Roboform kindly remembers for me.

It is very important that you have a strong master password. I have a long one which is a combination of nonsense phrases for my childhood (in random upper case and lower case) and a few numbers and symbols. This would be pretty hard to crack but is easy for me to remember.

As an extra precaution I do have a copy of it with another person just in case.

Roboform also generates passwords for you – I get it to generate 40 character passwords for me now. And I never have to worry about remembering them.

I have a paid version plus an online backup and I use roboform on my phone and tablet.

Another feature that I love is that it can fill in forms for you – so I click on registration forms are done – this is such a fantastic time-saver.

My affiliate link gives a very good overview – and remember the free version is quite feature rich.

This is also extra protection against phishing sites as Roboform fills in your login and password from the correct originating site – so if you click on an email link and roboform does not popup – then you have probably clicked a phishing link.

Zapier and IFTTT are prime examples of a new class of clever software that allow your apps, programs, social media to “talk” to each behind the scenes. This is commonly called task or app automation.

Zapier (which is more business orientated than IFTTT) describes what it does this way: “Connect the apps you use, automate tasks, get more out of your data.”

Once set up you have an automated service that works seamlessly.

Some basic examples that I use are:

Utility email invoices:

usually they are sent 2-3 weeks before their date due, so I have them “zapped” to an Evernote notebook with a tag of “to-do”
I put a reminder in Evernote manually (some reminders I’ll put a few days in advance)
then a “Zap” puts them on my google calendar.

This is a very simple example – much more complex automations can be fairly easily done.

What this means for me is – I don’t forget invoices, and the zaps save me probably 5 minutes of time.

Website examples:

Any new tweets are zapped to that website’s facebook account.
Any new facebook posts are zapped to a blog category in the website
Any new form submissions are zapped to a google spreadsheet (handy if you want some staff to be able to work on new form submissions and note what they have done on the spreadsheet so they don’t need access to the backend of the website
new form submissions can also be cc’ed to another person’s email or to their Slack account or made into a new Trello job

No more “forgotten password” meltdowns

Task and app automation