Straw-0.18 was released today. The ebuild for 0.17 works as well, it just needs to be renamed.
Just got an email from freshmeat, announcing that straw 0.18.1 was released. This is a bugfix release that includes icons for online/offline state.
It is now up to 0.18.1 It compiles fine on my machine (Athlon 1.4Ghz, 512RAM) with the same dependencies as the existing (0.17) ebuild, so requires only the filename to be changed from straw-0.17.ebuild to straw-0.18.1.ebuild.
0.18.1 is in the tree now