I use GitHub and Flowdock everyday and one thing they both support is these little emoji short-codes like :+1: and :smile :.
Usually I go to emoji-cheat-sheet.com/ and lookup new codes but, then I decided It might be more fun to write a quick access popup extension for Chrome. Et voila, turns out it was much easier than I thought.
Install the plugin from the Chrome Web Store or check it out, with a small demo, on GitHub.