This plugin has a new home. It will now permanently be hosted on Wordpress.org:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vimeo-badge-widget/

If you downloaded it off my site, you may want to re-download it from Wordpress.org. One person who was trying to use the plugin was running into problems because their server didn’t have cURL installed. I found wp_remote_get() in the Wordpress Codex. Sadly, it’s not documented at all.

So, if you’d like to make a call to another server, it looks like wp_remote_get would be the function to use. It checks to see what is available on the server and then uses the appropriate function. You can use it as so:

$response = wp_remote_get($remote_url, array('timeout' => 60));