You can also use an algorithm. I do something like create a 'base' that is used for all sites. And then something like take the number of letters in the url google = 6 and add it the beginning. Then take the second letter from the right and last, 'o' and 'e' and add it to the end. In the end you get 6baseoe. Unique password for each website.

Passphrases are a really good idea, but a lot of sites have very short length limits.

Granted if they have limits thats a really big red flag that they're storing your password in plain text, as a hash should always be the same length, so you probably shouldn't sign up there anyway. I remember a few years ago I was signing up for a TD account, and about 5 pages through the signup page it wouldn't allow me to continue because my password was /too secure/ (not their exact wording, but that was basically the problem). What makes it funnier is a lot of sites would reject the password I used at the time as not being secure enough.

I stopped signing up at that point, but I remember getting a phone call (!) from them a couple days later asking why I didn't finish the sign up, and my answer was: because I'm not giving my money to a company that doesn't know how to store passwords!

One of the benefits of learning to program J for me has been to make it easy to remember hard to crack passwords. I have some passwords which are actually runnable J on-liner programs and contain all kind of '#!$' symbols. All I need to do is remember what they do so that I can recreate them.

I've memorized an algorithm instead of trying to remember passwords. I don't actually remember hardly any of my passwords, instead I use this mini algorithm that I came up with to create unique passwords for each site I go to. Each time I go to a site it just takes me a couple seconds to figure out what the password is. I find it a lot easier to remember that one algorithm rather than trying to remember a bunch of passwords or rotating through the same few passwords.

What I've found is that some sites will either truncate your password without telling you or restrict you to 8-20 chars.

Sometimes sites limit you, my bank for example has an 8 character limit.

becausetheyoftenfailwithwebsitesandit'skindofdifficultvaryingthemobscurelybutmeaningfullyenoughonapersitebasis.