I'm attempting to put together a little mashup with some twitter APIs. However, the whole area is new to me (I'm more of an embedded developer dabbling). And frustratingly, every tutorial I am trying in Php is either out of date, not doing what it claims to do, it or is broken.

Essentially, I just want a nice bit of example code - say, an HTML file, a connection.js for the JQuery magic, and a php file - 'getsearch' which contains the relevant Curl calls to the API to just return the results for a given search term.

Followed the tutorial to the letter at http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/using-jquery-php-ajax-with-the-twitter-api/

and even downloaded the guy's code and chucked it on my webserver, but it just seems to sit there.

I'm relatively competent at php and html, but it's the Curl and the JQuery side of things which is new to me, and would appreciate any thoughts, links, or code suggestions. I've attempted reading the API - but even that seems sparse - and several links are broken to their own tutorials, so that's put me off a bit for now.