This site has a rather novel approach to dealing with passwords. I see this a lot in both my personal and professional life, especially when people lose their computers. The question looms ‘Did you… ?” and usually the answers aren’t very good at least from a security standpoint.
One of the biggest things that people can-and-should do is keep individual passwords for every single site they access. Most people could approach this via tools like my beloved 1Password but this may be another approach that might also work. It uses an encryption staple called a hash to generate a multi-character password based on some simple password, a salt (which is used to increase the randomness that is added to the encryption routine) and the domain you are working with. It’s quite elegant in that it offsets the need to store individual passwords because it, supposedly, relies on stable domain names to provide password reproducibility. Each time you enter your simple password, and the domain name hasn’t changed, you should get the same hash over and over again. I still think that 1Password is still the best choice for everyone, but this might be a good starting place especially if cash is tight and you can’t swing a 1Password license.
UPDATE: After trying this out I discovered that it only really works well on plain sites like Google.com. If you go to any other sites, like Apple or nytimes.com the code breaks down on Safari. I couldn’t get it to even work on Firefox 13 on the Mac, so perhaps this isn’t as robust as I had hoped. The idea is still good, however. For what it’s worth.