A Deprecated Wordpress Plugin.
When working on profiling a Wordpress install I found, to my surprice that for a 400 comment post the single most expensive thing was translating smilies to pictures — 55% of time to create the page!
Apart from sending a patch fixing this (which went into Wordpress 2.8) I also made a small plugin to use before the new version was available.
It is no longer useful as everyone should be using a modern Wordpress version.
It can be found here.
Perhaps you should write on the whole thing more often