new utils file for general methods. This first method grabs the query string variables from the URL

js/utils.js

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+
+// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1403888/get-url-parameter-with-jquery
+function getURLParameter(name) {
+  return decodeURI(
+    (new RegExp('[&?]'+name + '=' + '(.+?)(&|$)').exec(location.search)||[,null])[1]
+  );
+}