This is just a very quick tip for your WordPress blog. One of the most annoying things about WordPress’s default settings is the fact that smileys are turned on by default. What’s a smiley, you say? When you put characters together like a colon and an closing parenthesis, WordPress replaces the text with a little yellow smiley face. How cute.
The problem is, many times WordPress theme designers put styles in the stylesheet to control any image in the content div that will either float all images or maybe put a border around them. The result is a screwed up story … all because of this “cute” little feature.
On top of that, let’s say you wanted to put an actual parenthetical statement in your blog story. Now imagine that your parenthetical statement ends with the number “8″. You wouldn’t think that would be a problem … but if you have smileys turned on, it is a problem. You end up with a super cool picture of a smiley face wearing a pair of sunglasses. You see, if you put the number “8″ next to a closing parenthesis, you get that little sunglass sporting smiley face. Pretty annoying, huh?
So here’s how to turn them off:
Go to your WordPress admin panel and click on “Options” then “Writing”. In the “Formatting” section, just uncheck the box that says “Convert emoticons … to graphics on display”. Once this is unchecked, you won’t see any more annoying smiley faces.
Whew! That’s better :-)
I suppose it depends on the person. I love smilies. I think it’s the after effects of too many years on too many forums, but I find it hard to leave a comment without them!
(I tried really really hard on this one. ;) )
Michael,
I hear ya man :-) I’m with you, I love using smiley’s but I don’t so much love how WP converts them to graphics.
Nathan
Thanks – I didn’t realize you could turn them off. Although, sometimes I want to use smileys and sometimes I don’t.
:)
Thank you, I really needed this…the smileys always screw up the alignment of the following comment in my blog.
By the way, any tips on how to enable that “notify me of followup comments via e-mail”?
Smilelys are harmless.Besides there are few methods on the net to use to get your point across.
Have the cap setting on and people think you are yelling at them.
So I stand by WordPress on this one.Smilelys are useful when making a strong statement without being misinterpreted.
Gio : the problem you are having with your comments sounds more like a coding issue to me.
Excellent Post, thanx for sharing the same.. Will keep on reading the post :D Stumbled your post .. cheers
:D Excellent – thanks! Personally, I like the extra degree of continuity better
than I like looking like another Yahoo customer.
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Found this thru a quick Google rather than stumbling thru WordPress’ mass of options. Cheers man, appreciate it!
I had this problem with the Thesis template framework on our master cleamse site. We had several pages broken and it took weeks to finally figure out that it was the smileys.
Hello Nathan,
“Options” in WordPress is now called “Settings”, perhaps you could change that so people who come from Google aren’t confused first off? Thanks a lot for the tip!
I actually the like smileys. My problem is I can’t find a list that has more than 15 examples of how to make them. Any suggestions?