I rolled out a new emoticon set this morning. I expect it will still get improvements (they look a little boxy to me), but everything starts somewhere! This is based partly on the old UBB-esque standards, and partly on the text underlying the emoticons.
Also, the default avatar is now a blank pixel, getting rid of the annoyance of having a full-sized avatar (which actually exceeds the official limit) when the user may want none.
Thanks for reading! Hopefully the next entry will be more interesting.