When I did some upgrades to my website a week ago, I added in support for smilies. I used Lisa’s excellent tutorial to set them up on my site. I’d suggest you do the same. I can offer one extra bit to make things go a little faster.
Download one of Jason’s Basic Sets of 17 smilies to use on your site. Create a directory /images/smilies in the root level of your weblog website and upload the 17 GIFs there. Then use the two blocks of code I’ve provided below instead of Lisa’s code and you’ll get Jason’s Basic Set working without any extra typing. Pretty easy.
Use this code instead of the code in Step 3 of Lisa’s Tutorial, and use this code instead of the code in Lisa’s Step 7.
Of course you might be the kind of person who needs “special” smilies, in which case you’re on your own. But if you want to get the basic 17 going quickly, this should help.
Update 6:30am — I had to remove the code from the post and insert links to text files with the code. With smilies installed on my site, it was substituting the smiley graphics themselves for part of the code! Too smart for my own good sometimes—or maybe too dumb—still trying to figure out which.