I was perusing the Web looking for some quick and dirty Javascript I could use with the Twitter Search API to display a list of recent tweets containing a particular keyword. I came across the monitter.com widget, which was almost exactly what I had in mind, except that it includes some really great, rich features that were well beyond what I needed. I adapted and simplified the monitter script to:

1. Fix an issue with unescaped characters, e.g. hashes, in the search query.

2. Fix an issue with ampersands in links in the linkify() function.

3. Replace some deprecated HTML tags, e.g. bold, and fix other XHTML validation issues, e.g. using self-closing img tag.

4. Fetch search results only once, rather than every few seconds (since Twitter sets a rate limit of 100 requests per-hour per-user, I found this to be necessary).

6. Specify the number of tweets to return using an additional class.

7. Remove the fade-in effect.

8. Hyperlink each user's profile image to their timeline.

Just like monitter, TwitStream utilizes the jQuery framework. Because jQuery is awesome.

What's New in v1.2

One bug was fixed in this version:

1. The alt attribute was added to each user's profile image.

What's New in v1.1

1. Updated date/time display on tweets to match the format on Twitter - previously the exact time of day was shown, now a relative time (e.g. "about 1 hour ago") is shown instead.

2. Added new optional settings to include "Reply", "View Tweet", and "RT" links on each tweet.

3. Made all links in tweets open in new windows.