Show last 5-6 post titles on different page?

I use the following piece of code on my website home page footer which you can see here.

<ul>
	<? query_posts('showposts=10'); 	// latest blog story?>
      <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
      <li>&raquo; <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
      <?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

This shows the latest 10 post, just change the number showpost=10 to whatever you want.

Hope this works for you.

Thanks Crondeau, however, the page that I am embedding these in is a standard HTML webpage and not part of WordPress.

If you are trying to do this on an html page that is in html format and outside of your wordpress theme, then it won’t work. You will need to change it to php and write a php script.

Here is another option, and for me it works flawlessly on WordPress 2.9.2:

(It displays the last 5 posts in a list as linked post titles)

<ul>
 <?php
 global $post;
 $myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5');
 foreach($myposts as $post) :
   setup_postdata($post);
 ?>
    <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
 <?php endforeach; ?>
 </ul>