This seems completely backwards to me:

> Do not store emoji unicodes in your database. Store the human-friendly code and support the emoji-cheat-sheet.

I would strongly recommend doing the reverse: store and use standard Unicode throughout your application. If you want support on browsers which do not support Unicode 6 properly, use JavaScript or a web font to substitute the characters in question so you don't need to update every bit if text you've ever stored or displayed when e.g. Chrome lands emoji support in a few releases.

This approach avoids having to fix your proprietary encoding scheme later and also means that less popular user agents automatically get support as soon as they add it.