tablesorter only on blur not keyup

tablesorter only on blur not keyup

I posted this under a different username, but my work email is blocking zoho so I recreated it here under my personal email.

Is there a way to  have my filters fire only on blur? It seems that firing on every keyup is causing issues.
Also, I am very new to AJAX and tablesorter. Is there a way to not have the request fire if there are no filters selected? Currently the page loads with a filter parameter, if the user removes that filter I do not want the request to fire. It would bring back too many results to make sense.