Those darn smileys
Update: Thanks to some (no actually a lot of) help from Collin in the comments I found the right things to change to fix the smiley problem. And, in fixing that, the problem I was having embedding images in posts has also been fixed. So, big thanks to Collin and Muppet award to me for not realising how easy it was to fix. And sorry to anyone who left a comment recently that I removed the smiley(s) from; I won’t be doing that any more.
Original: I like smileys; you like smileys; everyone likes smileys. They’re an easy way to add ‘tone’ to your blog comments and forum posts, so you can make it obvious when what you’ve said is supposed to be a joke. They’ve probably saved many an unwary Internetter from getting into a flame war with someone, because as we all know text only communication is very easy to get wrong.
Which is why it is with a heavy heart that I’ve had to start editing them from comments left here on The New Wolfs Howl. I didn’t want to have to, but I’ve been finding that they are totally screwing up the way the comment is displayed. The smiley ends up in some random place, not where the commenter originally intended it to be, and the words in the comment get moved about so much it becomes less easy to read. Try as I might, I have not been able to find a way to stop this happening and so, to protect the clarity of the comments, I’ve started to delete smileys (you’ll know when I’ve done it, because I’ll put an edit message in the comment).
I’m sorry I’m having to do this and I hope you’ll forgive me. 
(You see, even that one’s not in the right place! And look where it’s put this line. Of course, if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you won’t be able to see what the problem is, will you?)
A picture of you
While I was playing about with installing 2.5, I noticed that the comments screen shows a little picture for each person that’s commented (previous versions may have done this, but I never noticed). This little picture - called an avatar - is usually what the person has uploaded to their blog as their profile picture, but can also be a variation called a gravatar. Gravatars (or globally recognised avatars) can follow you from site to site, because they are linked to your email address.
I liked the idea of being able to display peoples gravatars on the blog, next to their comment. This required another plug-in and some hacking around with the comments.php file, but I’m happy to report that comments are now a little more graphical.
It’s a small thing, really, but it keeps me off the streets.
Doh!
Sorry. When I was making my theme changes yesterday, I was playing around with a number of other files and settings and I managed to break the commenting mechanism; if you left a comment at any point over the last 12 to 15 hours you probably got a “Not Found” error and I won’t have received your comment. It’s all fixed now, so you can comment away as normal.
Thanks to brightfeather for bringing the problem to my notice.
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