Inspired by the selection of smilies over at Making it Up, I’ve expanded the range of smilies on this blog (by pinching theirs). So, if you’ve been frustrated that you couldn’t put a little waving person or a Pacman drinking a pint of Guinness to express yourself properly, your day is a little nicer.
In case you’re interested (and you’re able to fiddle about the innards of your blog, and your blog is powered by WordPress) here’s how to do it.
- First, catch your smilies. Do this by visiting them in your browser and doing Save Image As, which is probably on the menu you get when you right-click. Save them to your hard disk.
- Put them onto the computer that hosts your blog, into the wp-includes/images/smilies folder, where you’ll already have things like
icon_eek.gif. - Take a copy of wp-includes/vars.php, just in case things go pear-shaped.
- Edit vars.php. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see an obvious list that shows smilies or magic text going to a .gif file. Add to this list so that new magic text goes to the new .gif files.
- Test it out in a new post. If you’re happy you can get rid of the back-up of vars.php.
- Smilie-tastic!
