The above 3 lines don't strike me as particularly maintainable or patchable because they seem like a significant amount of work to read and understand.  Now maybe for people who spend LOTS of time around jQuery, this just isn't issue (and feel free to tell me that that's what's going on).  But I rather wonder if what's actually making it so hard to read is that almost every 5 or 8 characters, the statement switches levels of abstraction (jQuery -> HTML Markup -> DOM -> URL -> nickname -> etc.) which forces a mental context switch.  I'm wondering if this wouldn't be fairly straightforward to make more readable, perhaps by limiting the number of abstractions per statement.