Password aggravation

I'm on so many different sites these days, all with different passwords and log-in details, that I've completely lost track and can't remember *any* of them.

Last week I thought up a really good new password, totally personal to me (but without the usual birthdays or husband's names etc), that nobody would ever be able to guess in a month of Sundays. Today I thought I'd set about changing one or two of the odder ones to this new one.

Talk about frustrating. So far I've tried two. Google (for this blog and various other sites) wouldn't accept it because it was 7 digits and they insist on 8. I had to add something silly to get it to accept it, so now I probably won't be able to remember it any more than the old one.

Then I tried Wordpress and they were even worse. They didn't mind the 7 digits, but refused utterly to accept the new password because it was 'too weak' even though it's already a mix of letters and numbers. Kept telling me I *had* to have a mix of upper and lower case letters. In the end I gave in and made one of the letters upper case, even though that would have been harder to remember again. It came back with more red stuff on the screen, saying it was *still* too weak and I had to have 'special characters' (like ? or £). It simply will not accept anything without. I had to give up in the end, and keep my old password, which is also 'weak' by their new definition, and much easier to hack or guess than my new one would have been.

It seems utterly mad that you can't now change your own password to something that you, yourself, will be able to remember and re-use. Make it too weird and you simply have to write it down somewhere to memorise - and where's the security in that?