The Password Meter Feed

Based on the advice of one of the code contributors (in advice only of course), I have removed the bulk of the input fields originally used to display the counts and bonus points.  Using such fields does not fit into current web standards from a semantic standpoint, so I agreed and replaced them with divs instead.  For anyone who saw the previous form, you should notice little to no difference in cosmetic appearance.

Other than that, I am still hopefully anticipating feedback from any visitors that may be interested in contributing to the development of this project.  Perhaps when I have a little more time available, I’ll revisit the code to see where I can possibly improve the scoring methods.  Until then, feel free to download the code and play with it.

The Meter Man

I updated some of the javascript so that now the background color of the Bonus cells will correspond with your individual scores. I’m hoping that this will make it that much clearer to users as they test their password strings. I also made the code for this site available for download under the GNU General Public License (see download link at the bottom of the page).

In addition, I have determined, at least for the moment, that weighting each piece of criteria is going to be much more difficult than anticipated. My current method relies on adding/subtracting fixed values from the overall score based on the chosen characters. But doing so leaves the possibility of achieving a final result that is less than zero or greater than one-hundred. To fix this issue, I simply capped the final bonus values at a minimum value of zero and a maximum value of one-hundred. However, this is not terribly optimal. So I’m putting this out to the general public in hopes of obtaining useful feedback from others, that will ultimately help me to improve this tool. Please feel free to leave any suggestions/ideas using the comment form below.

Thanks in advance,

The Meter Man

The application you see at passwordmeter.com is a prototype designed to assist users with building and selecting strong passwords. The application has gone through three minor revisions already, and I have no plans to stop tweaking it any time soon. I am very much interested in getting feedback from the general public. Any advice you have on how the application could be improved is welcomed and appreciated.

The current release as of August, 27 2008 (v.1.03), contains the bulk of the checks and balances that I had originally planned on adding to the app. However, there are three additional changes that are currently under development.

1. Eliminate all unnecessary table structures within the application to conform with current web standards.
2. Recalculate positive and negative weighting algorithms so that both add up to 100 potentially canceling each other out.
3. Add in the ability to run checks against a server-side library using Ajax calls to eliminate common words found in an english dictionary.

The first task should be done shortly after I get a bit more sleep. The second change will take a little longer as cross-browser CSS support still tends to bog my brain down at times. The third and last option will require even more effort and time since I’ve never dealt with any of the Unix/Linux-based spell check mods. Any advice in this area in particular would be greatly appreciated.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more updates!

The Meter Man