A 16^th century French diplomat, Blaise de Vigenere, created a very simple cipher that is moderately difficult for any unintended parties to decipher. It is somewhat like a variable Caesar cipher, but the N changed with every letter. You would "encode" your message with a passphrase, and the letters of your passphrase would determine how each letter in the message would be encrypted.

This is the exact opposite of a "Variant Beaufort." To do the variant, just "decode" your plain text to get the cipher text and "encode" the cipher text to get the plain text again.

If you wanted even more security, you can use two passphrases to create a keyed Vigenere cipher, just like the one that stumped cryptologists for years. Again, a pretty simple trick, but it can ensure that your message is even harder to crack.

Recently, a judge created his own "Smithy Code" in a legal document, but some errors were made. You can see what people consider to be the correct code with the fixes in upper case.

This is your encoded or decoded text: