I was provided with a license in exchange for my honest review.  All content herein is 100% honest and my own opinion.  I pinky promise.

We live in a very digital world.  Cell phones, tablets, television, internet radio.  Most of us have multiple accounts set up with various numbers of digital services.  Banking sites, online shopping, social media, media streaming – all of these services require you to set up accounts with them.  How do you sign into these accounts?  With a username and password, right?  We all know that the best way to keep these accounts secure is to use different passwords and usernames for each one.  At least different passwords.  But most of us can’t remember that many different passwords, right?  How about just one password?  That’s something I can handle, how about you?

STICKY PASSWORD
PASSWORD MANAGER
JUST ONE PASSWORD TO REMEMBER

Let me introduce you to Sticky Password.  It’s how you will only have to remember one password.  Ever.  It’s an automatic password manager and form filler.  That’s right.  It remembers all your usernames and account information.  It will even fill in forms for you.  Setting up a new account on a new website?  You don’t have fill out all the information!  Sticky Password will do it for you!  It will make your internet dealings so much easier.

You download the software and set up your account with one password.  Sticky Password doesn’t even store your password, no one but you knows it (so don’t forget it!).  With the premium version, you can set it to sync across your devices.  Sticky Password uses AES-256 – the world’s leading encryption standard, so your info is safe and secure.  This is the encryption the military uses.  Sticky Password features optional synchronization via local Wi-Fi so your encrypted data never evens leaves your devices.  It works across all devices and platforms.  When you’re making new accounts, Sticky Password will come up with super strong passwords for you and you don’t have to remember them.  With Sticky Password, you are in complete control – you can delete your information from the cloud any time.  Sticky Password works in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

You can download the password manager for free and try the premium version free for 30 days. Or use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter for your chance to win a lifetime or one year license.  Giveaway ends May 1, 2015 at 11:59pm PDT.  Two winners will be chosen at random and announced on May 4, 2015.  Good Luck!

Spring is here!  Well, sort of.  It snowed yesterday, but it was all gone by about noon.  Admittedly, it’s not terribly unusual for our weather to be confused this time of year.  But it is starting to warm up!  And that means play dates, park visits, splash pad trips and other fun days out of the house!  There are just some things that make getting out and about in the gorgeous weather a whole lot easier, especially when you’re toting three mischievous little boys along.  The first three items I keep in my car so they are ready to go when we are.  It makes it super easy to have them ready and waiting in the car.  Less for me to remember, less for me to load and less for me to forget.  The last three items are ones that I have gotten in the habit of taking with me (usually) and not a part of our out-the-door routine.

My Momma Must-Have
Springtime Accessories

1. Blanket.  Impromptu picnics, baby’s napping unexpectedly, makeshift shade at the park when all the covered tables and tree shade spots are taken.  We use our ‘car blanket’ for all kinds of things.  It’s been a lifesaver on more than one occasion.  If it gets dirty, we take it out and replace it immediately with a new one.  If I don’t get it laundered right away, it’s not a big deal and I don’t have to worry about getting it back out to the car.

2. Book or a magazine.  I love reading, especially in the warm sunshine.  Books are a must have springtime accessory for me.  I never know when I’ll get a few minutes to sit and read.  Some times, it’s just in the pickup line after school.  Some times, on rare and glorious occasions, one or two boys will fall asleep and I’ll sit in the car while Daddy runs into the store.  With e-books being so popular, I often take actual books along with me in that format, but I like to look at printed versions of magazines.  I tend to be able to find a spare moment or two more often in the car than at home.

3. Car-friendly toys.  More outings means more time in the car.  Being strapped in a car seat is hard for little ones that want nothing more than to climb and run and explore.  I keep a little container with some toys and books in our car.  We call it The Car Box.  The toys are played with in the car only.  They are returned to the box every time we get out of the car or they don’t come out the next time.  It helps keep the peace at that ridiculously long stop light.

4. Water.  When you’re out running around or playing, it can be all too easy to forget to keep up your intake of fluids, especially water.  My boys don’t love the taste of water and getting them to drink can be tricky.  But, it is so important to keep everyone hydrated!  I take my water bottle (because I will almost inevitably end up sharing) as well as extra bottles to refill mine and to give my kids.  We keep straws in the glove compartment.

5. Sun block.  There is nothing worse than a sunburn, expect maybe sunburned kids.  In the rush to get out the door, I have forgotten sun block too many times.  I keep a small travel-size tube in my purse and one in the diaper bag, just in case.  A momma on the go needs and wants to protect her babies.  Sun block can help keep your kids skin healthy and it will save you a few painful days too.

6. Cell Phone.  Of all the things there are to grab on your way out the door this is my number one, must-have momma springtime accessories to make every outing a success.  My phone is much more than just a phone.  It’s my alerts and reminders, my camera, my connection to other adults.  It’s a very important part of my arsenal.  I try to be very conscious of being in the moment, but I don’t know what I would do without my phone.

The NEW Motorola DROID Turbo in Sapphire Blue has some momma must-have features.  An amazing display and a powerhouse processor can handle all the photos you can snap and post to all your social media at the same time.  Don’t forget to send those ice cream-covered faces to grandma in a text or email.  With 48 hours of battery life, you can do it all.  Oh, no!  Little Jenny has a dance recital or Little Jimmy has a t-ball game and your battery is running a little low?  Charge the DROID Turbo for 15 minutes with the Motorola Turbo charger and you’ll add eight, EIGHT more hours to your battery life.  Plenty to get those photos you don’t want to miss.  The Turbo is made with a water-repellent nano-coating and Corning Gorilla Glass to help protect the device from spills and scratches. Premium ballistic nylon backs offer rich blue color and texture but remains lightweight and feels great in your hands.  Protect your investment from those grimy kid-hands!  The DROID Turbo Sapphire Blue has a distinctive look, is incredibly durable with a layer of Kevlar (that’s the stuff they put in safety gear for soldiers!) and the battery life is incredible.  A definite must-have among the springtime accessories every momma needs!

What’s your Springtime Momma Must-Haves?  Let me know in the comments!

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

As a blogger, I will tell you that I am pretty much always connected to the web.  Or I can connect to the web in a matter of minutes.  That’s where my people are, and a huge part of blogging is connecting to my community.  I am a work-at-home mom, but a lot of my work actually happens on my mobile phone, whether I’m at home or not.  There are certain sites I access regularly.  It’s so much more time consuming to type in the web address every time I need to access a site.  So, I create shortcuts that allow me to instantly access favorite websites from my phone in a single click.

One of the sites I frequently visit is my own.  Whether I’m checking formatting, copying URLs, or referencing different content, I probably access my site between a half and two dozen times a day, depending on what I’m doing.  Since typing in the URL every single time would be cumbersome and annoying, I set a shortcut on my homescreen that I can press and it will automatically load my page.

Want to instantly access favorite websites with the touch of a single icon?  It’s amazingly simple to set up and such a time-saver.  I’ll tell you how to do it in the Chrome browser; it’s a simple three-step process.  Seriously.  If you’re running iOS or using a different browser you can check out the links at the bottom of this post for step-by-steps on your particular browser.

Directions:
– Open your browser and type in the web address for the site you want.
– When the page loads, hit the settings button and towards the bottom is “add to home screen”.  Yep, select that.

– You can edit the title that appears under the icon on the home screen if you want.  Select “Add”.

– And now you are set to go!  Test it out.  Pretty awesome, right?  Just think of how much time you’ll save!

Now, if you prefer a different browser (or OS), you can check this out for step-by-step instructions on how to add shortcuts from your browser.  Since I don’t have these devices, I can’t promise they will work.  But, from a site with a name like How To Geek, you’d think they should work…  So, what’cha waiting for?!  Let me know if the link isn’t as helpful as I think it will be…

So you may have noticed I didn’t post much last month.  While I have been crazy busy – and not just in real life – that’s actually not the main reason why.  You also may have noticed a new layout and design here on While He Was Napping.  Weeelll, I did it.  I switched to WordPress.  So, that’s the main reason I’ve been MIA out here on the front end.  I’ve been trying to get everything all set back up and functioning.  I wasn’t exactly planning to move before the end of the year – as if my life isn’t busy enough without having to learn a new blogging skill set, figure out servers and FTP clients and redesign my whole site.  Although “redesign” is a loose term here.  But here I am.  So how did I get here?

There’s a lot I want to share and a lot more that I could say, but there are hundreds of articles and posts on moving from Blogger to WordPress; believe me, I think I read them all.  This isn’t a how-to, mostly because I really have no idea how to do it.  I couldn’t give you a step-by-step if I wanted to.  But, I can give you some info and a heads up that might make your switch a bit easier.  These are the things I wish someone had told me before I plunged in head-first.

–  Research, research, research!  I had planned to spend the next three months researching just what I wanted out of my move.  That’s not what happened at all!  I was flying by the seat of my pants.  The ideal move would take 2-3 days to completely get everything transferred and set up.  I’ve been trying to get things ironed out for nearly four weeks… because I’ve had to do things by trial and error, rather than having a good idea of what I want and how to get it.  Try to choose a theme (Genesis is highly recommended and it’s the one thing I didn’t really think much about.  So, far I’ve been happy with it) and a child theme, if you choose, before you start your move.  I decided to buy the Genesis framework and add a child theme later if I couldn’t get things to look the way I wanted.  I’ve tried about five child themes… so check it out before you jump into the fire.  Take your time and make sure you feel comfortable with moving before you do it!  That’s my biggest regret.

–  Not all hosting companies are equal.  This is where I got into trouble.  As I mentioned, I wasn’t planning to switch before the end of the year.  But I started looking at hosting companies and the one I was considering had a sale going on… and it ended in TWO DAYS!  I debated as long as I could, but I didn’t want to let the deal go so I decided .  I’ll just transfer over slowly, I though.  Except, I learned pretty quickly, it doesn’t work that way.  But I’ll get there in a minute.  After doing some research, I discovered the hosting company I’d chosen had notoriously slow page load speeds for blog-type sites, but did well for sites that were more commerce-based and not so content heavy.  And, while it was a good price, it wasn’t that much lower than this hosts regular costs.  I totally fell for that “SALE!” banner.  I realized I needed to look for a hosting service that fit my needs, not the cheapest one I could find.  Decide what is important to you (load speed, dedicated server space, commerce friendly options, downtime, etc) and then look for a deal on that. I ended up switching server hosts and that set me back about 48 hours in my transfer.  Then I had to go through the process of getting my original purchase refunded.  Helpful hint: if you do end up needing to switching hosts, do it and then try to get your refund.  It’s harder for them to convince you to stay if you’ve already moved.

–  If you aren’t setting up a new domain, you need to switch everything over as quickly as possible.  More accurately, once you start the transfer process, don’t stop!  Why?  Because people can’t access your Blogger site and your WordPress site at the same time if you only have one domain.  I was going down a list of steps I’d found “to successfully transfer your website” and stopped for the night after doing something I really wasn’t sure I’d done correctly, let alone what it actually did.  It was changing my server name.  It took me almost 24 hours before I realized that all outside links (Pinterest, anyone?) linked to my new WordPress site… that had absolutely nothing on it.  Whoops.  And it took me a whole day to get things moved over to where it was all accessible again.

–  The Set Up.  There’s A LOT more set-up than I realized before you even get to the whole transfer part.  I had this vision in my head that transferring over my 1,000+ posts and nearly 5,000 comments would be the hard part.  HA!  Because I wasn’t purchasing a domain name from my hosting company (I did that a couple years ago through Blogger and Google), I had the option of moving my domain.  Everything I read, it sounded like it was advantageous to switch, so I decided I would.  But, I didn’t know how.  It was just a whole ‘nother step.  Then there’s choosing a theme.  And a child theme.  Then comes the importing part…

– The WordPress Jargon. Theme.  Child theme.  Plug-ins.  SEO Optimized.  Responsive widgets and themes.  CSS styling.  While I has heard these terms, I didn’t really understand them.  Genesis is an awesome theme, but the design is incredibly simplistic.  Unless you are good (and I mean like pro level ninja skills) at coding or simplistic black and white is your ideal design, you’ll want a child theme.  There are probably hundreds of thousands of child themes out there.  Choosing one is like picking the perfect grain of sand from a beach!  Because I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of child themes, I ended up choosing one of the child themes offered from Studio Press, for simplicity sake.  And they had a 30 day guarantee (that I actually ended up using).  But I had no ideas for redesigning my site and that took some extra time.

The best plug-ins depend on what you what your site to do.  I tried a lot, I mean A LOT, of plug-ins and have it narrowed down to about 8.  But you have to have an idea of what you’re looking for because there are almost as many plug-ins as there are child themes.  And when WordPress is updated, developers have to update their plug-ins to make sure they remain compatible.  Not all developers do.  So, some plug-ins don’t work like they used to.  You have to spend some time checking them out.

Responsive pretty much just means that the theme or widget will adjust to the many, many, many screen sizes that are out there.  That way things look good when they are viewed, regardless of whether it’s on a  large desktop screen or a tiny little cell phone.  Definitely a first world problem, getting your internet site to look good on any size screen, but design is an important part of a website.

–  WordPress ISN’T magic!  So after I transferred everything over my Google Analytics stats almost doubled.  I was in heaven and actually thought, “wow, WordPress really is magic!”  You guys, it’s really not.  It’s a great blogging platform and can do amazing things, but it’s not magic and it won’t double your page views at the snap of your fingers.  And turns out, the Analytics plug-in does the same thing as when you paste the code into your theme manually.  Can I just tell you how disappointing it is to cut your monthly page views in half when you think you’re this awesome rock star completely dominating a new platform?  It’s a sad day.  However, your page views shouldn’t really drop much either.  I don’t get tens of thousands of page views a day, but my traffic stayed pretty consistent through out the transfer.

– WordPress also isn’t Blogger.  Did Captain Obvious just walk in the room?  I know what you’re thinking, ‘hello, duh!’ right?  But let me explain.  I’ve been blogging for over 5 years.  On Blogger.  The longer I spend on WordPress, the more similarities I can see and realize it’s really not that different.  But, when I first got here, I was so frustrated with the new layout and that I couldn’t figure out how to make things do what I wanted them to.  I had to let go of my

– ‘No Coding Needed’, not ‘No Coding Allowed’.  Confession: I can’t code… but I think I can.  My friend, Christina, very accurately described it as “you know enough code to get yourself in trouble”.  The beauty of WordPress is that you don’t need to code… well, anything… if you don’t want to.  But, I had gotten it in my head that I WASN’T ALLOWED TO code anything.  And that’s not true.  I don’t suggest messing with your parent theme, since that’s usually the basic functions, if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing; but absolutely play with your child theme, if you want to.  Change fonts and colors and the form of your site, without messing up the function, by making adjustments to your child theme.  You CAN code, but you don’t have to.

–  You CAN move to WordPress yourself!  Sure, it’s overwhelming.  But as long as you back up your site, you should be okay (I actually created a complete duplicate of my Blogger blog content on a separate .blogspot blog, just in case I completely screwed things up).  If you get stuck and can’t undo a major mishap, simply reset everything and start over.  Not really what you want to do after a week of work, but the option is there if you really need it.  I’m sure it would have been easier and possibly less stressful to hire someone to do the transfer for me, but I’m glad I didn’t.  I really couldn’t afford to hire someone and I talked to people who did, and things still got messed up!  I have this weird control freak thing and if something’s going to get messed up, I’m gonna be the one to do the messing.  With Google, you can do anything.  In my many searches, wpbeginner.com came up time and time again.  Awesome tutorials with step-by-step instructions all broken down.  And they have a YouTube channel to really walk you through things.  It’s an amazing resource, so bookmark that baby if you’re going to be moving soon.

I wasn’t planning on switching to WordPress but my unplanned move taught me a few things.  I’ve only been here for a month, but it’s been a good move so far.  I don’t regret starting with Blogger and I don’t even wish I’d switched sooner.  I think the timing was good.  Another confession: I actually really only switched because I couldn’t figure out a way to make gallery pages that didn’t require a huge chunk of work – I haven’t gotten that far yet.  My biggest regret is not knowing enough beforehand.  Knowledge is power, people.  School House Rock was right.