I recently received some code to translate certain non-ascii codes in your article titles into a more URL-friendly permalink. Though, at David Black’s suggestion, I decided to use Iconv instead. Seeing that I’m creating permalinks in several projects now, I’ve extracted this into a new rails plugin: permalink_fu.

Let me know how this works out. Hopefully iconv is available on your platform too. It’s my understanding that it’s in the ruby standard library, and included with the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows users.