Using Smilies
A tutorial for inserting smilies or other images into email messages and forum posts.
But first a definition. URL means Uniform Resource Locator. That’s a fancy name for the address of a page or file on the web. You have already used URL’s even if you didn’t know the name. A URL looks like this: http://www.oldguy.us
Email
Web based email such as Hotmail and Yahoo do not allow you to insert smilies or other images that reside on your hard drive into an email message.
Email programs such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Microsoft’s Outlook Express, Qualacomm’s Eudora and Pegasus Mail that reside on your computer do allow you to insert smilies and other images from your hard drive into email messages. To insert one of your smilies into an email message use the program’s insert picture command:
- Outlook Express: Insert menu » Picture
- Eudora: Edit menu » Insert » Picture
- Pegasus: click the insert picture button on the toolbar.
- Thunderbird: click the insert object button » Image
Then browse to folder that contains the desired image and select it.
If you find smilies on the web you want to use, your browser can save them to your smiley folder. Position the cursor on the smiley you want to save. Click the right mouse button and select “save picture as.” If the name of the image file isn’t very descriptive, you can change the name to something easy for you to remember. Just remember to keep the file extension “.gif” the same.
Hint: keep a shortcut to your smilies folder on your desktop. This allows you to quickly navigate to it when you want to save a new smiley to it or insert a smiley in an email.
You can also insert an image in your email if the image is not on your computer but is on the web. Instead of browsing to the image in your smilies folder, type or paste the URL of the image into the picture file name field in the file open dialog.
Your email program will then go out to the web, download the image and insert it into your message. But this is an inefficient and wasteful (of bandwidth) method. If you intend to use the image more than once, you should save it on your computer.
Email & Forum Posts (automated)
There are programs that allow you to drag and drop smilies into email messages and forum posts. I looked at a few of them and, if I were to use such a program, it would be one of these:
Both allow you to drag and drop smilies to email messages (including web based email) and forum posts. Read the websites. Download the demo programs and chose one (or neither if you want to do it the manual way). Be sure and read the websites, help files and play around in the menus to get used to them.
Forum Posts (manual)
Most forums (also called bulletin boards or discussion boards) have a predefined list of smilies that you can insert in a message by typing in a special combination of characters. For example, typing :) or :smile: will usually cause a smiley face image to be inserted.
Even so, on occasion you may want to use a smiley that is not on the forum’s list. You may also want to insert a photo or other graphic image. Image tags allow you do so if the forum owner has enabled the feature. If you see buttons that look something like this...
in the window in which you compose posts, it means you can insert tags into the message. If you know the URL of an image on the web, you can enter the URL in an IMG (image) tag in the post where you want the smiley to be inserted. An IMG tag looks like this...
[img]http://www.oldguy.us/public/smilies/grin.gif[/img]
The highlighted portion is the URL. The tag tells the forum software to go out to a website and get the image file specified in the URL then display it in the message. In this example it is going to my website to the public/smilies directory to get the file called grin.gif. The result in your post is this: 
. This is called hot linking.
Hot Linking
Some websites don’t allow their files to be hot linked because when a file is retrieved this way it counts against their monthly allotment of file transfer bandwidth. Some webmasters view it as stealing their bandwidth so they disable the ability for to hot link to images on their sites. Others, like me, have a more relaxed attitude and permit hot linking.
I have a relatively small (less than 100 smilies) directory of smilies on my website. I put them there so that I could hot link to them. To my knowledge these smilies are all free for personal, non-commercial use.
You can view my collection on this quick reference page. If you would like to hot link to smilies in my collection, download smilies.zip. Unzip it and you’ll have a folder that contains my collection of smilies. The folder also contains a copy of the quick reference page named smilies.html. It is a cheat sheet that makes it easy for you to copy and paste image tags into forum posts. Double click the smilies.html file to open it in your browser and follow the instructions.
Why go to the trouble of downloading the smilies folder, why not just bookmark the quick reference page on my website? Because...every time you open the quick reference page on my website your browser will retrieve every image from my website. As of the time I wrote this, that is almost 300kb of files that will be retrieved. It will take a while to retrieve it (an agonizing amount of time if you have a dial up connection) and is wasteful of my bandwidth.
It is much better to download the smiley folder one time and bookmark the quick reference page on your computer. If you do that, each time you open the quick reference page your browser will display the smilies from your hard drive. The quick reference page has complete instructions for doing this. Just download smilies.zip, unzip the file and double click on the smilies.html file in it.
More Smilies
Now let’s go out on the web and find a new smiley for you. Go to ClickSmilies.com. This site allows you to hot link to their files. Select a category. Click on any displayed smiley. Look towards the bottom of the screen and you’ll see a box that has IMG tag code. Notice what happens when you click on the different smilies. The file name changes. If you see a smiley you want to save and use, click on the smiley then right click on the code box and select copy. You’ve just copied it to your clipboard and can now paste into a forum post or a text file for later use. While you are at it, right click on the smiley and save it to your smilies folder. Now you can put that smiley into both forum posts and email messages.
