Tip of the Day: If you have Movable Type installed on your website (or your workplace’s website) and you have an account on it, don’t make your password longer than eight characters.

My deputy at work discovered today that only the first eight characters of your password matter, and everything after the eighth character can be random garbage and it won’t matter.

Most of the time I would hear this and say “that’s good to know,” but I’m particularly annoyed by this fact because I happen to have an 18-character password that I have been typing in for over one year. Usually on regular working days, I sign in to our Movable Type installation at least once, and frequently more than once.

Yes, that means I have typed in 10 extra unnecessary characters to my password hundreds of times.

-__-

In other news, I finished sending out an all-campus mass email last night to advertise open positions at the Badger Herald. Sending out the mass email is probably the most stressful part about being the web director, and now that I’m done with it, I’m free from that duty until next semester, or at the very least, a few months.

Now all I have to do is survive through a day or two of people replying to the email asking me to re­move/un­sub­scribe them from the mailing list. It might not seem like a big deal, but because the mass email was sent out to 39,362 recipients, even less than 1% of people requesting to be removed is a couple hundred emails.