Thanks for the recommendations everyone.  The libraries installed on the machine I want to run Geany on are so far out of date that even jhbuild (to build a local updated version of GTK+) won't run without updating a list of dependencies.  I decided it was easier to create a shell script that SSH's to the newer machine where I was able to build Geany and calls Geany from there.  This allows me to run Geany on the older machine.