The process of inserting emoticons in blog posts seems surprisingly cumbersome. This web page (thanks to Jonathan Calder for pointing it out) kind of works, but the icons are too large and therefore mess up the line spacing 
as you can see.
as you can see.In any case, I don't necessarily want/need animated emoticons. Simple/basic graphical emoticons would do nicely.
Another option would be automatic conversion of simple text-based emoticons such as :-) into graphics (this functionality has been available in Mozilla Thunderbird, for example, for years). Alas, blogger.com obviously doesn't convert such text-based emoticons, as you can see.
The blogger.com help system doesn't appear to offer any help in this regard, nor is an emoticon option available in the blog post toolbar – see below.
Any suggestions, anyone?
