My Password Technique - What's Yours?

Is the beginning of the year a good time to change your passwords? Seems as good as any!

Here's my password "plan" to avoid using the same password on different URLs and hopefully prevent me from having to change ALL of my passwords at one time if there's a hack in one of my online profiles, etc.

I use a basic password that I customize for each URL. Then, I take the URL I'm logging into and pull two letters from it, capitalize them, and then add a weird symbol.

For LinkedIn, where my basic password is "pasword24" I would use something like: pasword24LI!

It's something I can remember and has lowercase, uppercase, numbers and a weird symbol. That way, all the passwords are similar and unique (to the point of a 2 letter ID that may be similar on different sites, like LinkedIn.com and Life.com (both start with LI).

You may want to use something that isn't a word or have duplicate or concurrent numbers or letters (which is why I deleted the second 's' and didn't use 21). I've been hit with that before and nothing's worse then having to have a special password once you've started working like this.