A while back I asked a question here about software to manage logins and passwords (http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000240). I appreciate all the answers and pretty much tried everything that was offered. Well, I now have a very different solution than I expected. Mainly, it taught me to better define the problem before looking for the solution.

While my definition was close, I really was looking for something a bit more generic. Sometimes what I needed was a login/password pair for a web page. But, many times, I needed something quite different. Let me offer some examples:

• For some financial institutions I want the URL, login information and one or more account numbers
• For some vendors I want to know a bit about them. For example, some won't ship to Nicaragua. Sometimes I want to add information about a recent order or the part number of something I might want to order in the future such as toner cartridges for my printer.
• I have various domains where I need information on where it is registered and where it is hosted
• Airline sites include a "club number" (for accumulation of frequent flyer miles) as well as a login
• I want to be able to store details of my local network somewhere
• Some web sites (such as this one) have database logins as well as my user login

I have more examples but that offers enough diversity to show that most customized solutions are really not the right solution after all.

What did I pick? KJots. It is a simple note taking application where you have books and then pages within the books. Other than that, no structure is imposed. I can then scribble in a page all the stuff that I feel fits together. For example, I have some shared hosting space on a server. I have the server administration access information, a couple of logins, various web applications with their location and login information and even when the various domains hosted there need to be renewed.

As far as accessing the information, KJots is capable of exporting the information as either a text or HTML file. Thus, I can copy these files (or the original XML file which is easy to read anyway) to a USB flash disk. As I have one on my Swiss Army knife (sorry, I'm a geek sometimes), this is easy.

My other concern was security. While I am not 100% happy here, KJots creates each book file in the .kde/share/apps/kjots/ sub-directory of your home directory. Once the book is created, KJots doesn't change the permissions so I just changed the permissions on my "secrets" book so that only I had read and write access to the file.

Finally, to make it easy to use, I created a desktop icon to start up the program. Thus, one click and it gets loaded. Being a small program it loads quickly and I have my "secrets book" available in less than 2 seconds.