I’m posting this here for future reference as I’ve had use of it in the past.

<?php
// Include to use built-in SimplePie functionality
// see: http://simplepie.org/wiki/reference/start for usage

include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed.php');
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function( '$a', 'return 3600;' ) );

// Set feed URL
$rss = fetch_feed('https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/YOUR_TWITTER_ID.rss');

// Checks that the object is created correctly
if (!is_wp_error( $rss ) ) : 
    $maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(3);
    // Build an array of all the items, starting with element 0 (first element).
    $rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
endif;
?>
					
<ul id="tweetbox">

<?php 
if ($maxitems == 0) {
    echo '&lt;li>Twitter unavailable at this time.';
} else {
    foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : 
    	//Fetch the tweet itself
	$xtwit = $item->get_description();
        //Remove the preceding 'username: '
	$xtwit = substr(strstr($xtwit, ': '), 2, strlen($xtwit));
	// Convert URLs into hyperlinks
	$xtwit = preg_replace("/(http:\/\/)(.*?)\/([\w\.\/\&\=\?\-\,\:\;\#\_\~\%\+]*)/", "<a href=\"\\0\" rel=\"external\">\\0</a>", $xtwit);
	// Convert usernames (@) into links 
	$xtwit = preg_replace("(@([a-zA-Z0-9\_]+))", "<a href=\"http://www.twitter.com/\\1\"  rel=\"external\">\\0</a>", $xtwit);
	// Convert hash tags (#) to links 
	$xtwit = preg_replace('/(^|\s)#(\w+)/', '\1<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23\2"  rel="external">#\2</a>', $xtwit);
	//Specifically for non-English tweets, converts UTF-8 into ISO-8859-1
	$xtwit = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $xtwit);
?>
    <li>
	<span class="update"><?php echo $xtwit; ?></span><br />
	<span class="date"><abbr class="timeago" title="<?php echo $item->get_date('c'); ?>"><?php echo $item->get_date('c'); ?></abbr></span>
    </li>
<?php 
endforeach;
unset($rss); 
}
?>
</ul>

Note: Use the jQuery timeago plugin to parse PHP date stamps into twiiter like time stamps.

Published on November 15, 2011