Best practices for loading page content via AJAX request in Rails3?

Suppose you have a page with two columns of content. For whatever reason, you wish to retrieve the HTML content of one of those columns after the page has loaded, via an AJAX request. The user does not need to take an action to make the content load (no link clicking or form submissions), it just happens automatically.

I can easily do this by returning an empty placeholder div in the main response

<div id="pink-dancing-elephants"></div>

and then add a little jQuery to the page

$.ajax({
    url: "/elephants/dancing/pink",
    cache: false,
    success: function(html){
      $("#pink-dancing-elephants").append(html);
    }
});

and have the action that responses to /elephants/dancing/pink return the corresponding blob of HTML.

This all works fine, but I'm wondering if I'm missing some Rails3 feature that would make this easier. E.g. I'm searching for the ability to be able to just put something like the following in the main view and have the rest of it happen by "magic"

<%= render :url=>"/elephants/dancing/pink", :remote => true %>

Am I missing something?