A simple hack that YOU can help me with.

[Andy Z]

Every time the page loads it will execute that query, every day the date() part will change with the server's clock. So the next day for your server it would return different results. With nicksaunders code it would pull the threads from the last 24 hours from the time the person called the page from his/her browser. To get this on a non-vB page, it still has to be a php-processed page (usually only .php like extensions). On the non-vB page put:
<?php
require('/home/username/public_html/forums/global.php');
?>
and replace that path with the paths to your forums (on most linux hosts that should be pretty close).