Pulling in recent posts to non wordpress home page

I saw there were a number of posts telling how to do this, however, the code posted only worked temporarily. It caused the site page load time to slow down dramatically and eventually threw errors and caused the page not to load at all. The code I saw is below- can someone either tell me why this isnt working or give me an alternative method? And yes, i changed it so it represented the path correctly to the header file. ??

// Get the last 3 posts.
//<?php
//require(‘/the/path/to/your/wp-blog-header.php’);
//?>

//<?php query_posts(‘showposts=3’); ?>
//<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
//” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent //Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?>
//<?php endwhile;?>