Drupal 7: Looking for suggestions on AJAX-base update to view
Wow this was not all that difficult after all.

The following forces the overlay to only be used for my desired node type and admin pages:

&lt;?php
  function yourmodule_admin_paths_alter(&amp;$paths) {
  $paths['node/add/user-update'] = TRUE;
  $paths['user'] = FALSE;
  $paths['user/*'] = FALSE;
  $paths['users/*'] = FALSE;
  $paths['node/*/edit'] = FALSE;
  // Add this for each content type you don't want the overlay to be used for.
  $paths['node/add/other-types'] = FALSE;
?&gt;


Then I needed a rule to redirect to my view (home page in this case) after the content was added:

{ "rules_redirect" : {
"LABEL" : "Redirect to home page",
"PLUGIN" : "reaction rule",
"REQUIRES" : [ "rules" ],
"ON" : [ "node_insert" ],
"IF" : [
  { "node_is_of_type" : {
      "node" : [ "node" ],
      "type" : { "value" : { "user_update" : "user_update" } }
    }
  }
],
"DO" : [ { "redirect" : { "url" : "\/" } } ]
  }
}


The combination of the two makes it appear as if the user is adding a "quick update".