The new talk of the SEO world is ‘Canonical URL‘. What is canonical URL? This is the definition given in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog…

a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Emphasis mine

It is very easy to specify the canonical URL of a page – all you have to do is add this line in the head section…

<link rel="canonical" href="http://binnyva.com/" />

The purpose of this tag is to prevent the problem of duplicate content.

The best thing about this tag is that all three major search engines(Google, Yahoo and MS Live) support this initiative.

WordPress

If you are on wordpress, this tag can be integrated into your theme easily. There is a plugin to do the job for you – but you don’t need a plugin to do something as simple as this.

header.php

Go to the theme folder in wordpress(wp-content/themes/<theme_name>) and open the file header.php in your favorite editor. Now find the line…

</head>

and add the following code before that line…

<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>

Now, it should look something like this…

<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>
</head>

That’s it – you are done! Save the file and upload it to your server.

This fix will add the canonical URL tag to all the posts and pages of your blog. If you want to see a blog that have implemented this fix, take a look at the source of this page.

Related Links

• Canonical URL
• What Is A Canonical URL?
• Canonical URLs To Avoid Duplicate Content
• Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

For you RSS readers, here is a preview of the new design. To see it in action, visit my site.

The Old Design

The New Look

Some sites I subscribed to recently updated their theme – so I thought that this is a good time to do the same for my site. I had been putting it off for a LONG time. People have been asking me to change the theme from the very first post on this blog.

I am planning to convert Bin-Co to this style as well – after I am done, I’ll publish the old design as a wordpress theme. But I’ll be very surprised if anyone uses it – because its just too ugly.

Any Problems?

I am sure that the new theme might have broken something or the other on this blog – so please keep your eyes open. If you find something out of place, please let me know. Just leave a comment and I’ll take care of it.

I have seen a lot of pages that lists many icon sets…

• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs
• Quality mini icons
• 90 Free Vector Icons Set
• The Top 50 Sources for Free Designer Icons
• Top 50 Supercool Free Icon Sets
• Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• More Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• Free Tiny Small Mini Icons Bullets
• Icon Finder – a search engine for icons

But when I want some icons I have a better place to look.

KDE and Gnome Icon themes.

I prefer using these icons because of the following reasons…

Multiple Size Icons

Most themes provide the same icon in various sizes. The available sizes are 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 22×22, 16×16 and sometimes even a scalable SVG set. Not all themes have all the sizes – but most have. I don’t have to tell you how useful this is.

Lots of Choice

KDE Look Icons page have 86 pages with 15 icon themes per page. That makes a total of 1290 icon sets. And I am not counting the Gnome Look Icons.

That’s a lot of choice. Granted, not all will be good. Not all will have the icon I am searching for. Not all have the size I way want. There will be some duplication. But its still a lot.

Free – in both sense of the word

Most of these icons uses GPL and LGPL licenses. So you can use if for your application without paying for them. You can modify them. You can share it with others. You can… you get the idea. The point is there are no restrictions.

Even if you are building a proprietary application, I think you can use the icons because you are not compiling it into the application. But I am not sure about that – if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment.

I have to warn you that not all icons sets use these licenses – so make sure you look at the license of an icon set before using it.

Great Icons

Most of the icons are created by professional designers. Sure there are some duds among the collection – but the majority of them are good.

Some Recommended Icon Sets

Crystal Project

Nuvola

Crystal Diamond

black + white icons

Crystal Clear

And there are hundreds more for you to find out…

Before starting, I must say that CSS is not the most powerful solution for templating. Using a server side solution is much more recommended. But for my purposes, CSS was good enough.

(X)HTML Code

If you want to use CSS templating, your app must be semantically valid. In other words, there is no way you can theme a tag soup.

Make sure that the stylesheet used for templating appears at the last. This will make sure that all the rules in the above stylesheets can be overwritten easily. In Nexty, I have a base stylesheet, then the theme stylesheet and at the end the hacks stylesheet…

<link href="css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="images/themes/crystal/theme.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style_ie.css" type="text/css" media="all" />
<![endif]-->

PHP Code

Very little PHP is involved to creating this system – I depend on it just to change the path of the CSS Stylesheet. The code used is…

<link href="images/themes/<?=$theme?>/theme.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

The $theme variable will change if the user changes the theme.