Joey,
What's wrong with using the 'New' section?
To do it with the cool links you'd need a TABLE of daily hits for every link, probably with the following fields; "Link ID", "Date", "Total Hits". You'd need to modify 'jump.cgi' for when someone clicks on a link - it'll need to check if there is an entry for 'today' for the Link ID, if not create one, if there is add '1' to the total.
Then when you do a site build you'd need a routine that would go through the 'Daily Hits' table and add up the last 30 days of hits for EVERY link, then sort out x no. of cool links for display.
Well, that's the logic (AFAICS), but I haven't got the experience to say how easy a mod it would be - sorry :)
All the best
Shaun