I promised I'd return to coding and here's the first fruit of my labours, a new version of Ruby/Google.
Version 0.6.0 adds a new method, Search#utf8(src). If src is not nil, query strings used by the Search#search and Search#spell methods will be converted from encoding src (e.g. ISO-8859-15) to UTF-8 prior to being sent to Google.
Additionally, something broke Ruby/Google in recent months, possibly a low-level change Google made to their Web API. I had a patch available fairly quickly to fix the issue, but I'm happy to say that it's now been integrated into 0.6.0.
My thanks go to Klaus Stein for alerting me to the UTF-8 issue that led to this release.
It does feel good to be coding again, I must confess. I'm looking forward to updating some of my other projects in the coming days and weeks.