Alrighty then — more goodies are in place!
To go with the (re-)addition of the smiley hack, I’ve combined a couple other ideas to really enhance the comment postings here. Now, when you leave a comment, in addition to the live comment preview, just above the ‘Name’ field you’ll see a ‘Show smileys »’ link. Clicking on that will reveal a row of smileys — click on any one of them, and the correct code for that smiley will be automatically added to your comment post. Not enough smileys? Click on the ‘More smileys »’ link for a second set. If you don’t want all those faces staring at you while you type, just choose ‘« Hide smileys’ or ‘« Hide more smileys’ and they’ll go back into hiding.
A close examination (well…okay, it wouldn’t have to be that close) of the multitudes of smileys that I originally posted will reveal that there are a lot more smileys available here than I’ve included as clickable in the comments area — I’m still deciding whether or not to add a third set to the comment forms. For now, however, should anyone want to use one of the other smileys…well, I’ll leave that as an exercise for you to figure out. :D
Thanks to ScriptyGoddess Jenn for the clickable-smiley code — the hide/show code I actually managed to figure out on my own after checking out quite a few examples, including Scripty Goddess Jenn’s, Aarondot’s, and an article from O’Reilly.