title: jQuery: Capture anchor href onclick and submit asynchronously
body: <p>I almost never get to play with client-side stuff, and this presumably simple task is kicking my butt :)</p>
  
  <p>I have some links. OnClick I want to prevent the default action, capture its href url, submit an ajax GET to that url, and simply <code>alert()</code> with the results  ...  but I can't even get past the starting line :)</p>
  
  <p>Example anchors for play-time:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;a class="asynch_link" href="good/1.html"&gt;Click Here&lt;/a&gt;
  &lt;a class="asynch_link" href="good/2.html"&gt;Click Here&lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, I've played with a few suggestions for <em>similar</em> requests on SO, but the links still cause the browser to navigate to the href url.</p>
  
  <p>Even with just</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
      $('a').click(function (event) 
      { 
           event.preventDefault(); 
           //here you can also do all sort of things 
      });
  &lt;/script&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...the links still navigate to the other page.</p>
  
  <p>I'm kinda feeling like and infant here :)</p>
  
  <p>Any and all help will be deeply appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>And, yes, I <strong><em>AM</em></strong> including jQuery :)<br>
  <code>&lt;script src="//67.20.99.206/javascripts/jqueryCountdown/1-5-11/jquery.countdown.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;</code></p>