In the world of free content, the only currency you need to carry is your persona. Many sites let you peruse their valuable contents only if you tell them about yourself: your gender, your age, your income and so on. You don't need to provide your real name, though an e-mail address is usually necessary for verification purposes. Privacy gurus tell us to keep different user names and passwords for different sites and services and to vary all of them periodically. But remembering all those passwords and IDs is nearly impossible. To avoid the dreaded "unauthorised access" page, I keep my Web passwords in my Rolodex, but that's just me. Here are several tricks for managing all your online personae.

Store your alter egos with your Bookmarks. In Netscape's browsers (versions 3 and higher), you can store any information in the Bookmark's Description field. First add the site to your Bookmarks, then click Bookmarks-Edit Bookmarks, right-click the bookmark you want to edit and select Bookmark Properties. In the description box, type your user name and password or a hint to remind you of either.

Better yet, here are two virtually unknown tricks for saving your passwords with your saved site information. These gems were submitted by Declan Fox.

1. Navigator Bookmarks: click Bookmarks-Edit Bookmarks, right-click the bookmark that you want to edit and then select Bookmark Properties. Click inside the Location field and press the <End> key to get to the end of the address. If the address appears as a "straight" address (that is, it ends with .com, .net, .html, or another common suffix), type a question mark followed by any information that will remind you of your "identity". The question mark tells the browser to ignore anything from that point on, but the information will display on the address bar whenever you go to that site. So if your user name is Bob and your password is cookoo, that line will be www.secretsite.com?bob cookoo. If the URL appears to be a query (that is, it contains reference to cgi-bin or some weird character strings), type an ampersand (&) followed by the reminder.

2. IE Favorites: Select Favorites-Organize Favorites, right-click the Shortcut you wish to edit, select Properties, click inside the URL box and press <End> to get to the end of the address. See the information in the preceding paragraph about adding a question mark or an ampersand.

Note that while some addresses seem to be pure URLs, they may in reality be pointers to queries (for example, mail.yahoo.com), so you'll need to experiment before you know whether you need a question mark or an ampersand.

3. Have IE 5 type them for you. The newest version of Internet Explorer offers an AutoComplete feature for Web forms that "remembers" user names and passwords after you type them into a Web page. These are stored in encrypted form on your hard disk. Just double-click a name field and you'll get a drop-down list of all the names you've used. When you select one, the password is entered for you.

Caption: Password Pal keeps your Web passwords handy and secret

4. Use a password utility. My favourite tool for keeping passwords at hand is the freeware Password Pal by Dotted Decimal Software. Click the key that Password Pal places on your toolbar and your passwords and log-on names will pop up ù password-protected, of course. You need to enter only one password to access all your other passwords, or you can configure the program to demand it each time you want a specific password. Webpass, a $12 shareware tool from C3 Software, will enter your password into a Web site for you at the click of a button, but it doesn't store it in password-protected form. Both programs are available on our cover CD.