Turning off smiley faces in wordpress posts

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.