> Twitter's JavaScript follow button isn't appropriate for us for a few reasons: firstly, it requires JavaScript (almost all of Lanyrd's functionality works both with and without JavaScript turned on)
Is Javascript really an issue in 2012? I mean, people can hardly use Twitter.com itself without JS turned on.
That said, there are sound technical reasons for working without JavaScript. Our mobile web app, http://m.lanyrd.com/ uses pushState and HTML5 offline caching if available, but falls back to working as regular HTML pages if JavaScript isn't available. This made it easy for us to add support for older devices, particularly older BlackBerrys, which choked horribly on our JavaScript - we simply avoid executing JS on those devices entirely, giving them a perfectly functional degraded experience with very little extra development work needed.
That's an indictment on Twitter's shoddy front-end code. The clean-up has already begun, but I don't know how much progress has been made at Twitter.
As was outlined earlier, reliance on scripting is going to bite an author inevitably.
Perhaps not twitter.com, but there are other ways to use twitter. (I use a command line python app (pytc).) So, it is quite feasible to browse with JS disabled and still use twitter. I like that websites have a fallback, so good on Lanyrd.