This plugin gives you the recent articles and opens up to style it a little bit more than the orginal. (After I had finished this plugin I found Drews recent articles plugin But i decided to post mine as well)

Attributes

All attributes are optional

limit
Number of items to display.

sortby
What to sort after. Default: Posted

sortdir
Sortdirection: asc or desc. Default: desc

class
This one will put a class to the wrapping <ul> element.

zebra
Specifies a class for every odd <li> example zebra="odd" will give us <li class="odd">.

category
List only from this category.

section
List only from this section.

Example
<txp:glx_recent_articles />
<txp:glx_recent_articles limit="5" sortby="Posted" sortdir="desc" class="recent" zebra="odd" category="mycategory" section="mysection" />

Download link is for RC3 or later. For use with older releases of TextPattern, download version 0.2