I've done this in Scriptaculous before but want to get it working for jQuery. The idea is to save the position and colomn of the items in the sortable is via ajax on the fly.

So have a look at this. Inteface Sortables

I've alter mine a bit. Now the Alert fires on "onDrop". What i need it to do is send the serialized data (the array "sort1[]=hopping&sort1[]=news....") via POST to a backend.php that uses it. But I'm not sure where to put it. The jQuery documentation offers a solution. Here it is.

Code JavaScript:
 $.ajax({
   type: "POST",
   url: "some.php",
   data: "name=John&location=Boston",
   success: function(msg){
     alert( "Data Saved: " + msg );
   }
 });
more examples here. I'm not experienced enough to know where to put it in the script part of the document. Somewhere is must put in either the (serial) or (serial.hash) or something else. I've tried all morning and no success. Please lend a hand. Will be happy to add to this post if you need more info.