How do I iterate through recently modified posts in Wordpress?

I have a client who has a WordPress installation with thousands of pages. There are a couple things wrong with this, mainly relating to speed and editing practicality. It's also an issue to find pages because they are ordered hierarchically. There are a few pages I modify fairly regularly and wanted a convenient way to find them. In order to do so, I needed to iterate through recently modified pages. Here's what I came up with:

function recently_modified_dashboard_widget_function() {
global $wpdb;

$querystr = "
SELECT $wpdb->posts.*
FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_type = 'page'
ORDER BY $wpdb->posts.post_modified DESC
LIMIT 0,25
";

echo "

\n"; foreach($wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT) as $post) { echo '
• '.edit_post_link( str_replace( site_url(), '', get_permalink( $post->ID ) ), '', '', $post->ID )."
\n"; } echo "

\n";
}

The query gets the last 25 posts of type page ordered by post_modified. From there, a foreach loop through the result yields individual posts in object form. The I used the post's permalink, stripping off the site_url() as the text for the edit_post_link() text. All is well. I'll soon publish the plugin which adds the list to the admin dashboard.