Why is it there?

It turns out the culprit is the WordPress plugin WP-Stats.

How do I get rid of it?

For once this is an easy fix All you have to do to get rid of that little smiley guy is put the following css into your theme’s stylesheet:

img#wpstats { display:none; }

And that’s it! Smiley face is gone

After modifying my test file so that it contains relevant and helpful html information I am putting it here for you to download and use for testing your WordPress themes. To use this file you will need to unzip it and import the .xml file under the tools section in the dashboard of your WP testing blog using the WordPress link for importing. Here is a link to the WordPress codex for more information regarding importing content into your WordPress blog. This file will add posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags to your blog for testing purposes. Please do not use this on your real or live blog, this file is for testing purposes only!

Screenshots

In this post I have put together the most useful (and free!) social media resources for your wordpress blog.

Sharing your Content

Adding social links to your posts allows your visitors to easily share and bookmark your content across multiple social networking platforms. Here are a few different ways you can do this…

Create “Sharing” Links

If you want more control over where your sharing links will go and what they will look like, the easiest way to do it is just add them yourself. Here is a list of sharing links for many popular social networking sites for use in WordPress.

Share on Digg

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=
<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" 
title="Digg This" target="_blank">Digg This</a>

Share on Stumble Upon

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=
<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" 
title="Stumble This" target="_blank">Stumble This</a>

Share on Twitter

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading 
<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to Tweet This!" 
target="_blank">Tweet This</a>

Share on Facebook

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=
<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" title="Share on Facebook" 
target="_blank">Share on Facebook</a>

Share on Friendfeed

<a href="http://friendfeed.com/?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=
<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank" 
title="Share on Friendfeed">Share on Friendfeed</a>

Bookmark on Delicious

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>
&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" title="Bookmark on Delicious" 
target="_blank">Bookmark on Delicious</a>

Bookmark on Reddit

<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>
&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank" 
title="Bookmark on Reddit!">Bookmark on Reddit!</a>

Share this on Design Float

<a href="http://designfloat.com/submit.php?url=
<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" 
title="Float This!" target="_blank">Float This</a>

Share this on Design Bump

<a href="http://designbump.com/node/add/drigg?url=
<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" 
title="Bump This!" target="_blank">Bump This</a>

Share this on Vot.eti.me

<a href="http://vot.eti.me/login.php?return=/submit.php?url=
<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank" 
title="Share on Vot.eti.me">Share on Vot.eti.me</a>

Here are a few links for your visitors to contact you through popular instant messenger services. Be sure and change the appropriate areas to your own username/email.

Contact me on AIM

<a href="aim:goim?screenname=yourscreenname" 
target="_blank">Contact me on AIM</a>

Contact me on Yahoo IM

<a href="ymsgr:sendIM?yahoousername" 
target="_blank">Contact me on Yahoo IM</a>

Contact me on gtalk

<a href="gtalk:chatjid=email@gmail.com" 
target="_blank">Contact me on gtalk</a>

Just Add a Button

These are a few different widgets/buttons that you can place anywhere in your post to allow sharing across most social networks with one simple button.

• Add to Any – Help your visitors share, save and subscribe to your content with Add to Any widgets. Features include customization, Google Analytics integration, keyboard navigation and more.
• ShareThis – Customize the look and choose what sites you want to target.
• AddThis – Create your own social button for sharing content or feeds.
• Social Bookmark Link Creator – Simply select your buttons, create, and put the code on your blog or website.

Use “Sharing” Plugins

Using a plugin is yet another way to add social sharing links. Here is a list of a few different plugins that will add sharing links to your blog posts.

Multi-Site Sharing Plugins

• ShareThis – Customize the look and choose what sites you want to target with this popular plugin… and unlike most sharing tools this one provides analytics.
• ShareThis 2.0 – A popular WordPress Plugin used to share pages via email, is now available in version two. This version allows for sharing via IM and texting.
• AddThis – This Plugin will automatically insert the AddThis widget below each post in your blog.
• Sociable – Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed and you can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!
• PingPressFM – Allows you to spread your blog to 30+ social networks via ping.fm.
• Digg Digg – This plugin is used to add Digg, Reddit, Dzone, and Yahoo Buzz buttons into your posts.
• iBegin Share – iBegin Share is the 100% open source solution that makes sharing and spreading your content easier than ever, all while giving you complete control. Includes the ability to save the page as a PDF or Word doc and print them as well.
• Social Bookmarks – Adds a list of graphic links to the end of your posts that will allow your visitors to easily submit it to a number of different social bookmarking sites.
• HB Social Bookmarks – Add social bookmarking to the sidebar of your blog with this plugin.
• Antisocial – Different version of Sociable that adds nofollow tags to the social media links.
• I Love Social Bookmarking – Simple plugin that allows your visitors to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons.
• Add Me Dichev – Renders social bookmark buttons with icons for more than 60 social sites at the end of your posts.
• SocioFluid – A WordPress plugin that displays small social networking icons which grow when moused over similar to the mac effect.
• Bookmark Me – A simple and light plugin to add social bookmarks buttons to post and pages.
• Social Bookmarking Reloaded – Simple plugin for social bookmarking in WordPress.
• Social Dropdown – This plugin displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown. Unlike other social bookmarking displays, this does not cause clutter and takes up little screen space.
• WP Punch Card – Puts 40 social bookmarking sites into a compact area to conserve space in your posts. Supports the usual major sites and others such as Yahoo My Web, Squidoo and more.
• obsocialbookmarker – A social bookmarking plugin which adds user-submission links at the bottom of each post for various social bookmarking sites which allows your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites.
• Bookmarkify – The Social Media Marketing Plugin that lets you put social bookmarking links in your posts and other pages.

Single-Site Sharing Plugins

• WP Digg This – A plugin that adds a Digg button, but with a twist. Instead of adding a Digg button to all your posts, WP Digg This plugin selectively adds the button only to posts you want.
• Digg This – a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story. When a digg is first recognized an email is sent to the site’s admin.
• Facebook Connect WP Plugin – WordPress plugin that allows direct integration of WordPress blogs with Facebook using Facebook Connect.
• Google Friend Connect Integration – Using the Google Friend Connect integration plugin for WordPress you can add more social interaction to your blog. Currently you can add a member, login, review, comment and playlist gadget as well as a social bar right away.
• Reddit This – A WordPress plugin that detects incoming links from Reddit.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the reddit post, for people to vote and comment on your story.
• Twit This – Creates a Twit This button on all of your blog posts that allows readers to share your content with Twitter. Includes a link shortener.
• StumbleUpon It! – This plugin allows your visitors to submit your blog posts to StumbleUpon.com’s bookmarking service.

Connecting with your Readers

Providing links to the social networking sites you are active on helps your visitors to be able to connect with you beyond your blog. Here are a few plugins that add your current social links and networking activity to your blog.

List your Social Sites

• Social Media Page – Adds a list of links to your social media profiles on a page or post of your choice through the use of a simple tag. A widget is also added so that you can display this list of links in the side menu of the site.
• Social Profilr – This plugin is a sidebar widget which will display icons for your social network sites that linkback to your social networking profiles with options for different sized icons.
• Follow Me – This plugin allows you to display links to all your social media profiles in one, easy-to-access button or window.
• Social Homes – A WordPress plug-in which adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons.

Display your Social Activity

• Profilactic – Publishes your LifeStream or informs readers where to find you online by parsing your aggregated activity mashup from Profilactic.com.
• Twitter Widget Pro – A WordPress plugin that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users. It’s set up like the RSS widgets, so you can have as many of as you want on your sidebars.
• Twitter Tools – A WordPress plugin that creates a complete integration between your blog and your Twitter account.
• Twitter Updater – This plugin automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.
• Delicious Cached – This plugin uses the built-in MagpieRSS engine functions to create a list of the latest bookmarks from your del.icio.us account.
• Smart Youtube – A WordPress Youtube plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists into your post, comments and in your RSS feed.
• FriendFeed Activity – A simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog.
• Digg Widget – Displays your past 10 dugg stories in a sidebar widget.
• Stumble Reviews – This is a wordpress plugin which shows your post reviews by stumble users.
• WP Lifestream – Displays your social feeds and photos.
• ComplexLife – This plugin shows your activity for any service that gives a date sorted rss/atom activity feed. The plugin then displays all that activity in any place you want it sorted by time, as a personal lifestream.
• SocialBoaster – Here’s a fun little script that will aggregate your Digg, Twitter and Del.icio.us activity and post it to your WordPress blog.
• Lifestream.fm – Provides a sidebar widget for your Lifestream.fm lifestream.

Other Social Networking Plugins

This is a random selection of social media WordPress plugins that do all sorts of “social” things

• Socialize Me – With the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress you can connect with people on services like: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Pownce, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and many, many more. When visitors arrive from these social networking sites they will be greeted with a simple message when they arrive “Hi, thanks for the visit! Wayne’s on StumbleUpon, too!” with a link to your profile.
• WP Digsby – With WordPress Digsby you can place a widget on your WordPress site so you can chat with visitors right from Digsby.
• Wordbook – This plugin allows you to cross-post to your Facebook account directly from your WordPress blog.
• Fotobook – a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account and import all of your photo albums into a page on your WordPress installation.
• Friendfeed Comments – This plugin will take the comments & ‘likes’ on your posts from FriendFeed and place them on the post that they’re related to. The comments come with the person’s name, a link to their FriendFeed profile & their FriendFeed image.
• Meet Your Commenters – When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network.
• Social Profiles WordPress Plugin – The Social Profiles WordPress Plugin was created in an effort to help get the members of your community more involved by giving them increased exposure by showcasing their profiles on selected social networks in addition to the standard website link on their comments.

More Resources

• Related Ways to Take Action – “Related Ways to Take Action” connects your readers to actions based on the stuff you’re already writing about – so you don’t have to do anything else! You’ll also be surprised by the local and global campaigns, petitions, and fundable projects recommended for your posts!
• Add Social Networking Icons to your WordPress Blog – Tutorial explaining how to add your own links and icons to your WordPress blog.
• SezWho – SezWho is a universal profile service for the social web that improves community engagement and enables content discovery to be added to blogs, forums, message boards and other social sites.
• Retaggr – A central location for your personal info, and a gateway to all your online profiles and networks.
• List of Social Media and Social Networking Sites – Continually updated categorized list of social networks.

An emoticon is a textual portrayal of a writer’s mood or facial expression. They are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. Early emoticons go back to the 1800s and commonly arose when casual/humorous writing was common. The emoticons on the Internet can largely be traced back to a proposal by Scott Fahlman in a message of 19 September 1982.

Emoticons in WordPress

There’s a default set of emoticons that come with every install of wordpress and are located in the folder wp-includesimagessmilies. Before they will show in your blog posts, the emoticons must first be enabled within the admin panel located under Settings → Writing. Make sure the box “Convert emoticons” is checked.

Style your emoticons

You can style the emoticons using the following image class:

img.wp-smiley

For example, remove the border around the emoticon and give it some space by adding the following code to your stylesheet:

img.wp-smiley { border: 0; padding: 0 2px; }

Use your emoticons

The following chart is the text/code needed to produce the corresponding smiley/emoticon.

View source (or copy-able text )

Change your emoticons

So enough fun with the boring ol’ default emoticons, you can change them to anything you want! There are a couple ways to do this.. Personally, I prefer to just change them out myself rather than use yet another plugin But there are plugins that will do it as well.

If you want to change out the default emoticons yourself, first backup the original ones! All you have to do is replace the old emoticons with your new ones making sure to name the new ones the same name as the corresponding default ones. Be sure and keep copies of the emoticons you are using because they will be replaced if you upgrade your blog automatically via plugin or admin panel on version 2.7 and up.

WordPress Emoticon Plugins

• If you would rather use a plugin to do change them, here are a few that I found:
• Tango Smileys Extended – disables the built-in WordPress smileys and extends the number of available smileys from 18 to 202.
• Smilies Themer – allows you to use smilies (emoticons) themes (or packs) to replace the wordpress default ones
• Smiley Switcher – With this plugin you can choose a smiley pack from the settings / options in admin or simply choose your own smiley pack directory.

Download New Emoticons

• Find all sorts of different emoticons at the following links…
• Aqua Smilies – created for WordPress
• White Emoticons Pack – created for WordPress
• Xpressions Emoticon Pack – created for WordPress, 4 different color choices
• Animated Chinese Emoticons – Animated emoticons and plugin
• 12 Emoticon Packs – 12 free super cute emoticon packs
• GreenSmilies
• Smileygarden
• World of Smilies
• TechFaq – Over 6000 completely free emoticons.

Learn more…

• Using Smilies – WordPress Codex
• Add Smilies To Your WordPress Blog with Smilies Themer – WordPress Hacks
• The Art of Smilies in WordPress Blogs – Lorelle on WordPress

:lol: :x

Read full article –> 38 ways to optimize and speed up your WordPress blog

Admin

• Google Analyticator – Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog to be indexed by Google search engines.
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by adding the necessary meta tags to all of your blog pages.
• Simple Tags – Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin. This is THE perfect tool to manage your WP tags. List tags, related posts, customized tag cloud and more.
• WP Super Cache – WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
• WordPress Automatic Update – WordPress Automatic Upgrade is a plugin that automatically upgrades your wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

Photo Galleries

• NextGEN Gallery – I don’t care what anyone says, this is the VERY best plugin for turning your blog into a photoblog, displaying multiple galleries on one page, whatever you need to do, there are endless possibilities with this plugin!
• FlickrRSS – If you just want to add a few photos to from your flickr gallery this plugin is super simple to use.

Add Videos to your Blog

• WP YouTube – Easily post your YouTube videos to your WP blog and automatically set the colors, borders, width, height and more of all of your videos.

Blog Customization

• Search Unleashed – Search Unleashed extends the standard WordPress search and provides a full text search with wildcards, logical operations, and highlighting across posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, and meta-data.
• Favicon Manager – This is a small plugin that allows you to manage the favicon image for your WordPress installation.
• WordPress Related Posts Plugin – WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.
• Breadcrumb NavXT – This plugin generates breadcrumb navigation bars for your WordPress blog.
• FD Footnotes – This plugin provides an extremely easy way to add elegant looking footnotes to your posts.
• Eco-Safe WP Plugin – Go Green on your WordPress blog and offer Printing Alternatives with this new ECO-SAFE wordpress plug-in.
• Separate Comments & Pings Plugin – This plugin quite simply separates your comments and your pings!

Feeds

• Feedburner Feedsmith – The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Feed Count WP Plugin – Feed Count 1.2 is the latest version of my WordPress Plugin that displays the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed.

Contact Forms

• Secure Form Mailer Plugin For WordPress – This is the best contact form plugin I have found. Easy to use, totally customizable, and allows for multiple forms to be used.

Comment Control

• @ Reply – This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.
• Email Commenters – Sometimes you want an easy way to e-mail all the people who commented on a certain post. Up till now that took a bit of work, now it’s as easy as installing this plugin, and clicking the link you’ll get underneath each post labeled “Mail the commenters on this post”!
• CommentLuv – The CommentLuv WordPress Plugin will visit the feed of the comment author and attempt to scrape the last post they made and display it under their comment, this way you can encourage people to join in the discussion of your posts and give something back straight away.
• Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.
• Simple Recent Comments – This plugin returns a list of the most recent comments on any post of your blog in a simple, css customizable way, just add a template tag in to your theme.
• WP Comment Remix – WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to WordPress. From Reply and Quote links for commenters, to a full upgrade to the edit comments pages in the admin panel, WPCR will save you time and effort when running your blog.
• Liz Comment Counter – Liz Strauss Comment Counter is a highly configurable badge (very similar to the Feedburner one, except it’s more configurable) to show off the number of comments your blog has.
• Show Top Commentators – Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.

PHP in Posts

• Exec-PHP – The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets.

Make Money

• WP Affiliate Store Plugin – If you make money on your WordPress blog with LinkShare, Commission Junction, ShareASale, Performics, LinkConnector, or Betty Mills, then try this plug-in. It allows you to Add products to your WP blog from any of the major affiliate networks, Click the POP button on your WYSIWYG post editor to add affiliate product links directly into your posts, and Build affiliate stores for your sidebar, footer, static pages, under a post, or randomly after posts.
• Cafepress WP Plugin – This plugin brings together the CafePress API, WordPress and the PrestoGifto API to allow you to layout your products, adjust thumbnail sizes, pick colors, fonts and more. With this plugin, you can choose any of the 59 million products that CafePress sells and put them in your sidebar, after your posts, in your footer or on a full page.
• Adsense Manager – AdSense Manager is a WordPress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets. Version 3.1.x now supports AdSense, AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks.

Social Networking

• Last.fm Records Plugin – This plugin shows cd covers on your WordPress weblog. It connects to last.fm and grabs the list of cds you listened to recently and tries to find the cover images at last.fm.
• Simplelife – Simplelife takes your feeds from around the internet and aggregates them into one online trail.
• Twitter Tools – Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
• Delicious for WordPress – Easily display your latest delicious bookmarks on your blog with this plugin.
• WP-Profilactic – The WP-Profilactic Plugin publishes your LifeStream or informs readers where to find you online by parseing your aggregated online activity feed from Profilactic.
• Social Links – Social Links is a sidebar widget that displays icon links to your profile pages on other social networking sites.
• Socialize Me – With the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress you can connect with people on services like: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Pownce, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and many, many more.
• Ping.fm Custom URL – Works with Ping.fm’s Custom URL feature to collect blog entries, microblog entries, and status updates and post them to your blog.