After gentle poking from Zach and Marjolein, here's the updated identi.ca badge, which runs entirely without Pipes:
If you see an author's name in a post, click it to explore his or her friends' posts. Click the avatar to visit the home page. To visit the author's identi.ca page, click the top link, to so-and-so with friends. Unicode should be (finally) working.
Other new goodies: click the date to visit the post, the in-reply-to link to go to the original, @-links to visit author pages, and #-links to go to the search page. Oh, and I think I've gotten most of the default colors to match identi.ca; sorry if this breaks any custom formatting, but I warned you not to leech it from me, didn't I? :)
To try this yourself, copy and paste the following wherever you want the badge to show up:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://kentbrewster.com/js/identica-badge.js">
{
"user":"kentbrew",
"server":"identi.ca",
"headerText":" and friends"
}
</script>
Substitute your own ID in the user parameter; many of the other parameters available in Twitterati will also work.
If you find a working Laconica server that forms its RSS urls the way identi.ca does, the badge should work unmodified as long as you substitute the server name of your choice for identi.ca in the second parameter.
Sort isn't working on My Little Friend IE.
There's an extra call when the thing starts up; it needs to look up the numeric id and common name for the screen name you enter.
As it says on the About page, Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.
For more about the project, see Marshal Kirkpatrick's Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom, Hugh McGuire's Why Identi.ca Matters, and Edd Dumbill's Why Identi.ca is Important. Personally I'm thrilled by the idea and encouraged by its execution so far, and have been poking cautiously at Laconica for the past couple of weeks, hoping to contribute in whatever way I can.
For background information about how badges like this one work, please see Case-Hardened Web Badges, which I presented at Web 2.0 earlier this year.
As I've said before, this badge will hopefully wind up being hosted by the project. I don't mind if you try it out, but please host your own copy if you put it in production anywhere.
Have fun, and please let me know how it goes! (You can find me on identi.ca under kentbrew.)