TwitStream : jQuery, AJAX, and the Twitter Search API

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:Fix an issue with unescaped characters, e.g. hashes, in the search query.Fix an issue with ampersands in links in the linkify() function.Replace some deprecated HTML tags, e.g. <b>, and fix other XHTML validation issues, e.g. using self-closing img tag.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).Specify the number of tweets to return using an additional class.Remove the fade-in effect.Hyperlink each user’s profile image to their timeline.Just like monitter, TwitStream utilizes the jQuery framework. Because jQuery is awesome.