Here is a simple way to highlight your search terms and limit your searches to only posts, not pages. It creates two new template tags for you to use. It uses "" as the html tag. So you can just add a style to in your themes css. I use it on this site. Try searching for "WordPress" and "Javascript Timer"

I have always needed a calendar class that just works. I found this one that is really easy to use. So this works great if you want to hard code the calendar. I needed to be able to plot a date range and have the dates highlighted. The data is coming from a MySQL database.