One step forward, two back

Last night I had a bit of blast on the site, trying to finish off some of the features I never had time to put in before it went live.

We now have a AJAX powered search feature, currently it is only present on the home page and archive page, not sure if you need it in the side bar on every page or not?
I’ve also sorted, well close too to sorted, the seperation of comments and pingbacks. The styling is not complete but the function is there.
The final feature which is not quite working yet is a ‘mint popular’ list (it’s a clever play on the standard most popular list) on the archives page. However I’m having some problems getting it to call just pages and not files.

So I was pretty chuffed to get all this working, but some where along the line the Falbum plugin decided not to work. I don’t think this is just a plugin issue as the settings and database records are totally trashed. I’m pretty certain everything will work together but I just can’t get the plugin to re-install, every time I upload and activate it remembers the settings from last time, which are not much good.
Back to the drawing board I think.