I have a bad habit of making up fanciful passwords to various applications that require me to log in. Consequently, I've completely forgotten how to log in to my Movable Type account for umamitsunami.com. You may have noticed that I have not updated in a very long time. Part of that is ... that I've forgotten how to log in. An additional wrinkle is that I started the account before Movable Type unrolled their "recover your password" feature so I never set that up.
Any thoughts?
I'm not sure what kind of hosting you have, but you should be able to upgrade the version of moveable type to a version which adds the "recover your password" field, or you could manually go in and reset it in the database/settings file (I'm not familiar with MT but I assume they use something like this).
Posted by: Alice Lee | 07/21/2006 at 04:45 PM
That said, it's entirely fixable and I can try to help if you'd like (and trust a random reader of GGA).
Posted by: Alice Lee | 07/21/2006 at 04:47 PM
I wish I had something helpful to add, but as someone who has to constantly ask you for the login page to post a new story here (because he forgets), I find the irony almost delicious. Almost. ;)
Posted by: bowler | 07/21/2006 at 10:36 PM
Not sure if this will help you but as far as I know, most versions of moveabletype have a recover password feature. The problem is if you never put in an email address or a "secret" then you can't use it.
Go to your login page for movabletype. If under the login button there is a "forgot your password?" link then here's the instructions to get it to work at least on my ISP.
1) Login to your ISP's control panel
2) Click the MySQL Databased button/link
3) Click the phpMyAdmin link (usually at the bottom of that page)
4) On the left, select the database that corresponds to your movabletype blog (you probably have only 1 or 2 databases)
5) On the left, click on the "mt_author" link
6) Click the "browse" tab near the top
7) Find row for you and click the edit button (probably has a pencil icon)
8) in the author_email field type a valid email address. In the author_hint field type a secret word. Then click "go" at the bottom to save. DO NOT EDIT THE PASSWORD FIELD!
Now, go your movabletype login page and click the "forgot your password?" button. Put in your username and the secret word and click "recover". You'll be e-mailed a new password.
Posted by: greggman | 07/22/2006 at 04:43 AM
Is your password 'candy'? because candy is delicious.
Posted by: Tallest | 07/22/2006 at 09:31 AM
"I have a bad habit of making up fanciful passwords"…
Hm.. how 'bout "trange libellules"? I believe it's French for "strange dragonflies" or something like that, which would be very fanciful and.. weird.
Posted by: smokinpizza | 07/22/2006 at 11:14 AM
Candy is delicious. libellules is odd, even for me.
it's so dumb, i've had to start new amazon and ny times accounts because i couldn't remember the passwords.
my brain is not smart enough to solve this problem. where are you, technology, when i need you!
maybe i just need to carry a little notebook with me to remember all my various logins...
Posted by: jane | 07/22/2006 at 12:17 PM
This works for me: I've got like three or four passwords that I'll never forget (unless I'm drunk) and I always use one of them when I sign up for a new account. If i forget which one I used when I signed up for, let's say GGA, I try them all because I know that one of them will do the trick. This might not be the safest way to do it, but still.
Posted by: smokinpizza | 07/22/2006 at 03:09 PM
I have one really complex, memorable passphrase I use to unlock my Password Safe with all the real passwords...
...yet just this past week I found myself needing a password I didn't have saved in it. There's no complete solution, but things can help.
greggman's suggestion to configure recovery directly in the database is probably your best bet for this one.
Posted by: markpasc | 07/23/2006 at 01:02 AM
i assume that you host your MT server somewhere. is it on a friend's server, or your own account at an ISP?
if you can get access to the server, you can probably change your password.
find out what version of MT you are using, and which database backend you are using (either dbm, or MySQL). dbm files are just files in the file system, and with a bit of Perl, you should be able to decode it.
Let me know if you need help, I'd be glad to lend a hand.
Posted by: mikanboy | 07/25/2006 at 11:31 PM
av A
Posted by: kuwang | 09/19/2006 at 01:07 AM