I have to admit, I love WordPress. I didn’t always love it. Years ago when it was still evolving, I found it more trouble than not. Admittedly, that was when I was still married to the old “hands-on HTML is the best” way of thinking. Well, WordPress certainly changed since then, and so has my attitude about it. I’m simply a girl in love.

Another one of my loves is smileys. I think it’s great that WordPress incorporates smileys into its system. However, the choice of smileys is not very exciting. There are some great plug-ins that allow you to expand your smiley options, but the available alternatives are few.

Recently, my own pixelling has been heavily in the emote area. Yes, even though I still think of them all as smilies myself, there IS a difference between emotes and smileys, and there are some people who are VERY particular about it. Nevertheless, when setting up a blog recently, I wanted a nice set of colorful emotes–and simply could not find any. Necessity is the Mother of Invention, so I went and created a batch myself.

This pack include 22 emoticons. All were hand-pixelled by me. The graphics are static, as I know there are many people who prefer non-moving emotes for their blogs. However, I am working to make an animated set of these emotes in the near future. Even though these emotes were developed for WordPress, they can certainly be used independently on forums, websites, chats, etc.

The pack also includes all of the necessary files for WordPress, as well as a Readme with my terms of service. I do want to also note that the file names of the smileys are the same as the base names of the default WordPress smileys. So, if you don’t want to mess with installing a pack, you can just upload these to your smiley directory. They will overwrite/replace the originals and should work fine.

You can download the pack HERE. We’ll also be listing it over at the WordPress site soon. scriptmonkeys-basic