Weather-Icons-Rails: My First Ruby Gem

First I want to give a huge thanks to Lukas Bischoff for designing this font, and Erik Flowers who originally added the css to turn it into a web font, and finally the Font Awesome Sass gem that I used as a template for Weather Icons Rails.

I originally started this project because of the lack of an easy to use web based font that included weather icons. I had been working on my current project EarlyWord, and was hoping to use Font Awesome to add icons to my weather app. Sadly the only weather font they had was the download from the cloud icon. This wasn't going to be of any use if I hoped to give the user an immediate sense if the weather through a small image. We wouldn't want users to think global warming had begun to cause data to fall from the skies...I was then fortunate enough to find Erik Flowers work, which is composed of some really Awesome fonts.

From here I ran into two problems. One was that my project didn't use Less, but instead used Sass. This was easily solvable by converting it to pure CSS and just including that into the assets file. This prevented me from using any dynamic coloring, and would make adding any special calculations for affects on the icons difficult. The second problem was the much larger amount of code that was needed to support pure CSS, especially once all of the mix-ins were removed and all the dynamic variables set to their static values. Instead I decided to convert it into Sass to work with the rest of my project.

At this point I got carried away and decided to check out Font Awesome Sass, and started working on a replica of it using these new fonts. It was surprisingly simple, especially once I discovered all of the commands rake provides to help with gem manufacture. I added a bunch of ruby helper methods, and modularized the CSS into sperate files. Using Sass I was able to create much more maintainable code using variables instead of hard coding all the CSS class prefixes.

After converting everything to Sass, and still not being completed satisfied with all of the code that now cluttered my assets folder, I packaged it into its own gem. Now I hope that others will find it as useful as I did. I would love to hear any suggestions on improving it. Still a work in progress, and will hopefully finish the test suit next. You can download the gem at Weather Icons Rails, and see the source code over on GitHub.