I absolutely love getting comments and emails! For a while, folks were having trouble leaving me a comment on blogger, so I added my cbox – chat box. It has been a cute and fun way to keep in touch with you! I recently received an email asking about how to add the little smilies to a chat box. I thought I’d just post about it, in case there are others who might be wondering the same thing. It doesn’t cost anything to add cute little smiley faces or different colors to a chat box. It just takes a little time. So… are you ready? Good! 🙂

First of all, you need to set up a cbox account for yourself, or open your account if you’ve already got one. Just go to the cbox website and follow the directions for adding it to your site.

To change the colors, go to THIS SITE to see various HTML color codes. Go to “Look & Feel” on the cbox site, then “colors & fonts”. Type in the code that you think would look good. Play around with them till you find something you like.

To add smilies, you must first find the smilies you like. You can take them from my chat box smiley section or from others’ cboxes. Anywhere you find them, just right click on them and save them to your hard drive. Upload the smilies to a photo sharing site, such as photobucket. Keep photobucket open in one tab, and open up another tab to your cbox account. Click on “options”, then “smilies” from the drop down menu.

You’ll then see a page like this:
(click to enlarge)

On photobucket, click on the smiley you want to add, then copy the “direct link” code. Paste that code on the “URL” line of the page above. Type some kind of code in the “code” line. For instance, you could call a waving smiley “:wave:”. When someone clicks on the smiley to add it to their message, this code will appear in the message box. The colons will separate the smiley from written words.

You can add another type of code, such as ” 🙂 ” for a smiley face in the “Alt code” line, but that is optional.

Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the page (see photo above) and click the “save” button. To add another line for a new smiley, just click “new row”.  To remove a smiley, just click the “x” to the far right.

To view your smilies, open your blog, or refresh the page, and try them out for yourself.

Have fun making your cbox…fun! 🙂 If you have any questions, just comment or email me using the contact page.

Happy blogging, and chatting,