jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Firstly, a huge thanks to Tony for such an awesome plugin and to anyone that can help me with this noobish problem.

I have a situation where I serialize an array with some page visit information and store it in the db, then unserialize and format into working urls so they are neat. This is no problem on the pure php/html/table pages... What I don't know how to do is how to get the result from my json page, unserialize & explode the array, then have the neat little url formatting in a cell. I think a tooltip would work too without functioning urls -just a list of page visits.

I can manipulate the data and format it, but have no idea when or where to do this in the best way with jqgrid. Ideas? I can post what I'm doing for the php manipulation if that helps...

thanks again!