Emoji apocalypse

I spent far too much time yesterday re-entering emoji’s for 100+ article titles on one of our podcast websites. I made a decision a year ago to make extensive use of emojis as part of our communications for our kid’s products. I haven’t performed any testing to see if kids respond to the imagery we create, so the end result could be having a little fun finding suitable emoji’s on emojipedia.

A week or so I noticed that all emoji’s used in titles had been replaced with question marks – no idea why, though I blame a bug in the Yoast plugin, the only difference between this site and others.

As an aside, I think it’s issues such as this that keep people employed as social media managers. What business owner has the time and inclination to deal with all the designed complexity of WordPress and other such tools, such as Facebook. If these tools were designed well, a whole group of people would be unemployed. Facebook is especially egregious. Despite having a huge staff of design talent, their business suite of tools are some of the most ill designed I have ever seen. Answering a query from a listener required a roundtrip through 2 devices and 3 different apps.

One of the remaining mysteries of my emoji cut’n’paste journey was the realization that in text displayed via WordPress, not css, the emoji’s that displayed are from Twitter Twemoji 13.0.1 and not those displayed by MacOS. This problem doesn’t reveal itself when viewing via an iOS device.

I’ll leave this issue to a time when I have nothing better to do.