I wrote a nice AJAX-driven directory for my organization that allows people to search in various ways. I have installed it on all of the organization's pages as a modal dialog. So far, so good.

Because the interface has many options, I have a ton of .click .change .keyup .mouseup listeners.

This means I have about 40 lines of jquery in the header of all my pages in the .ready call. This seems really inefficient, since that code has to be loaded each time.

Is there technique that I missed while teaching myself jquery for minimizing the code that has to be embedded in the page itself, instead of a cacheable external .js file?

Thanks!